Some interesting effects.
I see all tab contents are created as I suspected - and clicking on a tab just makes it visible.  
If I change one boolean value - they "all" are visible.  Probably not the most useful, but I'm exploring what options there are.

Turns out you can have the little undocked views and tab view at the same time

For maximum confusion !  .. the nice part is that both views are functional.  I remember previously, when switching between views, something would happen to invalidate the $scope and nothing would work until a hard refresh.   Perhaps this is a little bit closer to UI in UI ... still not there yet