Good point, this example needs to be fixed. I filed bug
18313 so we don't forget.
Polymer-expressions are typically intended to be used together with polymer, so we rarely use them on their own. Turns out that it is in the polymer package where we make sure that polymer-expressions work during deployment, but for examples like these where we are not using polymer, we need to do it explicitly.
The import to 'dart:mirrors' works, but it might generate an app that is really big. In polymer 0.9.5 we included an import to dart:mirrors, but we also include a @MirrorsUsed annotation to make the result smaller. In polymer 0.10.0-dev* we use code generation. Either mechanism should work for this example too.