I think the SVG icons are great and look pretty good, but if you want the old functionality of loading animations, take a look at the scss/ionicons/_ionicons-animations.scss file from beta 14 in the github repo. This was removed in RC0 but contains the logic that allowed for loading animations through icons…
No rocket science, just basically making a keyframe/animation that rotates 0-360 degress and applying that keyframe to the icon when the loading class is applied to the refresher.