1) Agreed. But we have the option to just declare it locally, and not add it to the prototype to make it truly private. By adding it to the prototype, we allow people to extend this method, which is looking a likely pattern for these components. 

2) True, and I agree. I think that the idea at the moment though is to normalise the public interface to these components, and until we've written a couple (or at least one!) real world examples, we won't know. It's common to have init methods that aren't called by the constructor.

Let's see how it pans out once we build stuff?