There was an example published in August 2012 on http://trek.github.com/ that was probably the best example I've found on the minimal things needed for an ember application. Unfortunately, since ember is evolving so fast the example no longer reflected how things work.
Around the same time I discovered that example the author had put together a wonderful example of how development could be done with ember/js. https://github.com/trek/ember-todos-with-build-tools-tests-and-other-modern-conveniences
So, in order to prove to myself that I know what I'm doing, I'm converting the first example to the style reflected in the second example.