You're right, thanks for pointing this out. I should look at what is being done before regurgitating my standard opinion of MySQL views.Quote from PocketChange:
This is one of those exception to the "rules" cases. The views are simple and result columns are all contained in the index...... all columns that were to be fetched from the table are already available in the index itself, SQL will use the values contained in the index and will never look up the original table row. This saves one binary search for each row and can make many queries run twice as fast.