"On the up side, you don’t ever have to manage indexes; Couch is smart enough to determine these for you." and "In place of the familiar queries, Couch supports the definition of Views."

Views aren't really synonymous with queries; they're conceptually closer to indexes: They rearrange the data in such a way that allows certain types of queries to be fast.

So in reality, you are forced to manage your indexes (views) in CouchDB.