The whole point of the OP was revealing the structure of the data being matched (like a routing file). This code completely obscures that. And I'm not sure this is more readable as the number of conditions grow.
I agree with swannodette that the CoffeeScript version is not better than the JS implementation but for a different reason. In my experience code brittleness is directly correlated to the number of "else if" conditions in a single block.
