No, you can make your own class based views with the 1.3 codebase. The docs describe them as replacing Generic Views, but nothing stops you from creating your own class hierarchy that inherits from the base TemplateView (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/class-based-views/#...)

Well, it affects generic views, yes. They also have several mixins that you can use in other views.