It is an MVC framework per se, but it's new and unique to this platform. It's very light, therr are about ~10 core classes. It also uses Smarty 3 (which is a big improvement over Smart 2), but the template system can be swapped out for pure PHP or another package for those prefer.
Ahh I see, there is no UI framework, just a simple list/view pattern. Views are loaded in HTML parts from the server (old school). I would like to see what people come up with using a framework like Backbone.
One of the driving ideas is that people will develop different versions of an Admin interface. What you see in the demo is just a template, like any front-end template, so creating one with Backbone would be an interesting project.