Yes there is. Modelling your frontend to be similar to the backend will always be helpful. The plus points I can think of are
- Hassle free handling of relationships.
- Caching of results in the store would save on server calls.
- Writing back to the server becomes easy if you suddenly need that.
- Selective data loading with the {async:true} option in relationships. Load only what you need.
Check out this link http://emberjs.com/blog/2014/03/18/the-road-to-ember-data-1-0.html for more information.