Interesting, that isn't transaction, it is just a workaround, and I don't think you can design your app like that which treat document as a transaction log. And then using view to generate the real information.
that's exactly how I design the parts of my app that need a transactional nature. Map/reduce views make it a breeze to query for a consistent aggregate view of the world.
This is not something new it's a well established technique from the relational world called "event sourcing"
when everything is a write you don't have to worry about conflicts or locks, so that's nice, plus couch is really good at scaling write thoughput with small documents.
Here's an example that explains how to get transaction-like guarantees from this kind of NoSQL data-store:
http://guide.couchdb.org/editions/1/en/recipes.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigCouch