I'm not sure if cloning and removing the node like this is a good idea.  Code outside of MEJS might have a reference to the node and find the reference suddenly invalid.  This actually broke my Jasmine test, for example.

Another issue is that by cloning before removing, if there is an id attribute on the element, there can temporarily be duplicate ids.  This might be pedantic, but there could be situations where this would cause a problem (especially in an XHTML document.)