Just had a response to a radar (thanks Apple Swift team) that you can now implement Objective C protocols with generic Swift classes. This means that you can make typesafe and composable classes to do much of the work for many UI objects without ugly wrapping code and indirection.
This example shows a really basic example and should work in a playground.
In production code I would not initialise the table view cells in the closure but would make the closure but would probably take either the table view as an argument and directly dequeue cells from it or would take the cell as the argument and only configure it in the closure. Still this approach allows much of the boiler plate and common code to be abstracted. The next level may use a similar approach to make each section and an array of such structures could be used to make the whole table (or collection) view.
There is still work for the Swift team to do as I don't think that you can implement the Objective C protocol in an extension to a generic yet. I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't be possible and I'm confident it is coming.
Update: It should work in a protocol. I'm not sure if I'm currently doing something wrong or if it is Swift compiler bug yet:@jl_hfl You should be able to use an extension. What problem do you hit if you try?
— Joe Groff (@jckarter) September 15, 2015