I agree that it depends pretty heavily on who is doing your HTML. That being said, you can just not use the defpartial stuff and instead include Enlive to use with Noir just as well. There are purposefully no constraints on what you use to generate HTML. The main purpose of settling on Hiccup in this case is to provide something that I think the Clojure web community desperately needs: a single place to start and build something. The only way I can provide that start pointing is by making some choices and running with them.

Also, I really love html functions as opposed to JQuery-esque template filling. It's cleaner and more flexible to me.