I keep thinking it would be nice if TS was an extension to Babel, so it could work with other presets/tooling in that space. Avoiding the double-ast cost when going through TS + Babel, just so you can get async functions and a handful of other goodies.
Async functions have arrived with this release. In my case i could remove Babel completely. Only drawback i noticed, the compile time is a little bit longer than Babel. But the file size of my compressed and optimized bundle shrinked from 690 to 650kb. I think it's worth trying out.