Should Components populate the view?

CakePHP is great with how much flexibility it can give you to approach a given situation. But I'm on the fence about whether components should be able to populate the view (like mini-controllers) or if they should be used only by the controller to pull out required data.

Here is two quick examples explaining the difference. The first, I use startup to gain access to the controller and use it to set some data for the view.

class NameComponent extends Object
{
    function startup(&$controller)
    {
        $controller->set('name', 'My name is Jonathan.');
    }
}

Okay, that was a pretty lame example but as you can see, I'm hooking into the controller and setting a new variable to be available from within the view. Now, let's take a look at the second example.

class NameComponent extends Object
{
    function startup(){ }
    function getName(){
        return 'My name is Jonathan.';
    }
}

In this second example, I return the necessary data back via the getName function. Therefore, it'd be the responsibility of my controller to do the work of populating the view.

Pros and Cons

In the first example, you have the benefit of just dropping the component in place and not having to worry about it at the controller level. On the downside, the component does one task and that's it (unless you include controller/action detection to provide different or limited content). In other words, I could create a "top 10 articles" component but if I wanted to have the top 5 articles, as well for a different page then I either have to create an additional component or include some the controller/action detection. With components setting their own view variables, I also run the risk of variable conflicts.

In the second example, I have the benefit of being able to modularize more into a "Controller Helper" type of scenario. Do I want a top 5, or a top 10? Maybe I want just a few fields from 5 separate models? I can just set up a method on my component to do this and let my controller ferry the data over to the view.

What is your preferred approach?