I had a little play with this and it appears that Vue does not re-render the entire list when using or if you use a component but it does with v-html. Heres the fiddle for the comparison:
https://jsfiddle.net/cxataxcf/
The key actually isn't needed here because the list isn't being re-ordered, so your issue isn't to do with :key but rather with v-html. Heres what the docs say about v-html:
The contents are inserted as plain HTML - data bindings are ignored. Note that you cannot use v-html to compose template partials, because Vue is not a string-based templating engine. Instead, components are preferred as the fundamental unit for UI reuse and composition.
So I guess this is where the problem lies.
It might be worth raising an issue on Vue's github page to see whether this is the expected behavior for v-html, but Vue 2.0 is much more heavily focused on components than vue 1.x and doesn't appear to recommend using v-html, so it may just be that you need to re-factor your code to use components instead.
Edit
The solution to this problem is to simply wrap the code in a component and pass the HTML as a prop:
Vue.component('unknown-html', {
props: {
html: ""
},
template: '
})
The markup:
And the View model:
var app = new Vue({
el: '#app',
data: {
numInputs: 1,
stuff: [{
'html':''
}, {
'html':'Foo'
}]
}
})
Here's the JSFiddle: https://jsfiddle.net/wrox5acb/