AngularJS accessing DOM elements inside directive template

I don’t think there is a more “angular way” to select an element. See, for instance, the way they are achieving this goal in the last example of this old documentation page:

{
     template: '<div>' +
    '<div class="title">{{title}}</div>' +
    '<div class="body" ng-transclude></div>' +
    '</div>',

    link: function(scope, element, attrs) {
        // Title element
        var title = angular.element(element.children()[0]),
        // ...
    }
}