Does "functional representation all the way down" mean that you never inherit from Component in the React apps you are building?
I've found the Functional component lifecycle events Inferno has quite interesting ( https://github.com/infernojs/inferno#functional-component-lifeycle-events ). Hopefully React will implement a similar feature some day (now that they hired the Inferno guy :) ).
Although I'm using JSX myself, I think it obscures what is happening under the hood. I don't really see what advantage it has over something like Hyperscript, besides looking a bit similar to HTML. There is an interesting Blog Post from Andre Staltz regarding JSX: http://staltz.com/some-problems-with-react-redux.html