Thanks for your interest
The api will really get a bit similar to gamestudios, with smaller and bigger differences. Which means that I will create something like those events in unity or also shiva and probably many other engines, as that is easy to create and works well to set and update entity behaviour.
You currently there is only an object class, which is just for the rendering and will be part of an entity class later on, but to create a new one, you just have to call any objects createObject(filename) function and it will return you a new object, which is freed auomatically if you don´t destroy it calling destroy before game exit. The position can be changed by changing the position elements x, y and z values and so on. An object consists of one or more meshs and a material for each mesh. A mesh is just a collection of vertices and is usually loaded from a model file. A material has all kind of parameters, can handle one or more textures and can have a shader. Shaders are provided with the material data if you use the predefined variable names in a shader. Materials also allow to register custom variables for a shader, which you have to allocate yourself, but will be freed automatically.
Textures and shaders are shared between materials and materials and meshs are shared between objects, but especially materials can of course be cloned.
For 2D, there is a panel class, which is basicly just a container with addImage and addText functions, so that the images and text objects are rendered in the order they were created (I will also add some functionality to change the order of course).
As the .3ds file format doesn´t really seem to support bones animations, I am currently writing some collada importer. Very minimalistic for now, but it is most probably going to be the file format for everything.

The whole stuff is written in Objective-C++, I am trying to keep the Objective part out, but did some mistakes, which shouldn´t be very hard to correct and which I most probably will correct in the future, even though I doubt that the engine will be used for another platform than the iphone, I want to keep the possibility open and basicly have some wrappers around the iphone specific stuff. That means that many parts are platform independant, or at least as far as OpenGl ES is platform independant, but for iPhone dev you need a mac in any case, and at the current state of the engine anyways.