Thanks for taking the time to review my review :)
In regards to view templating, I should probably qualify what really is a relatively minor difference for those reading this. With CakePHP, view wrapping works out-of-the-box, just save a default layout and your views are wrapped by the layout immediately. Layout wrapping in Zend actually isn't that difficult, only a few lines of code are required.
I think ZF users would benefit from an HTML helper, especially in light of increasing use of Ajax in web applications. I picture a lot of JS errors being avoided during development by having a helper generate HTML elements (unique ids, valid tags, proper nesting, etc). Heck, you could throw client-side validation (HTML, CSS, JS) into unit testing :)
I hope to have some time soon to take a closer look at 1.5. Thanks to you and Matthew for all of the great work on the Zend Framework.