If you don't like callbacks, you can wait until generators become available or use the likes of fibers today.

I've implemented a number of synchronous CommonJS specs on top of Node using fibers (https://github.com/olegp/common-node), which allows me to use libraries written for RingoJS (e.g. https://github.com/olegp/stick) with Node.

All in all I'm very happy with the stack I've built - I get the performance and low memory usage of Node combined with the ease of development of RingoJS.