pushState with non-hash URLs doesn't require you to do server-side HTML generation. You can just send a stub page which looks at the URL and loads the right data, just as with hash URLs. To deploy it incrementally, you only really need one code path with a slight fork depending on whether the current URL contains a #! and whether the current browser supports pushState.
I know, but browsers without JS need the server side generated content for that URL or the original complaints just arise again (empty page, albeit with a different URL now)
