Our organisation has compared the competing .NET solutions for creating web endpoints (WCF, WebAPI, and SignalR) and concluded that SignalR is the winner in the short and long term. This is supported by advice from our MS advisor who insists that for most applications SignalR is the best solution. However there is no way to create a Kendo UI datasource that will consume a SignalR endpoint. Adding this feature is a must-have requirement for the next release.

SignalR can be used only to signal datasource that specific row has been added, edited or removed. This way we would get minimal traffic in SignalR and with knowing which record changed datasource could be updated manually or automatically. This would be nice feature.
Look at this demo: http://www.jtable.org/RealTime wouldn't it be nice to have this feature for all datatsources? Grid is most obvious idea for usage, but all controls would benefit from SignalR support. It don't have to be build in inside KendoUI, support for SignalR could be added as extension. If You won't need it then You won't include it.
+1 from me, but it should be an extension. KendoUI can't have all features that we request build-in, but they can be added as extensions :)

SignalR is an RPC framework designed for invoking methods, not transferring large amounts of data surely that would kill the service bus bandwidth/connection bandwidth of the server?? -1 for me.