In most cases, you can use the key prop to specify keys on the elements you're returning from render. However, this breaks down in one situation: if you have two sets of children that you need to reorder, there's no way to put a key on each set without adding a wrapper element.
That is, if you have a component such as:
var Swapper = React.createClass({
propTypes: {
// `leftChildren` and `rightChildren` can be a string, element, array, etc.
leftChildren: React.PropTypes.node,
right