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I've been thinking much the same thing myself. Automation is cool and all, but whenever I play with these mods all I am really doing with the automatino provided is building more expensive automated systems until I reach the top of the tech tree and lose interest. So far the best idea I've come up with is to replace magical machine automation with a proper factory system, employing Testificates.

Give them ongoing needs and demands to keep them happy and productive and charge the player with expanding their village and defending them against zombie invasions. To create additional demand for materials like diamond and iron, maybe have machines require occasional repairing like manual tools.

This also means that when local resources are inevitably depleted, it takes considerable effort to relocate, since you can't just haul a few machine blocks somewhere new; you need to bring your workforce along and set up a new place for them to live. Basically plot the progression path into an ultra-light version of Dwarf Fortress' fortress mode.

We are not getting Survival Mode in Minecraft Pocket in February, and Mojang said nothing of the sort. This is the second time I've seen a pretty misleading news post on the front page about future plans. This is what he actually said about the February 8th update.

Quote from Daniel Kaplan »

What will the update include?

In the background a lot of stuff has changed to support the survival aspects of the game. You will see some neat looking animals and new blocks. Crafting won’t be in this update since we need to redesign the GUI for it and it will need some iteration and thinking. But the great part is that the foundation for survival will be mostly done and we can throw out much more fun updates! Yay! :biggrin.gif: And hopefully the progress of the updates will be much more faster. Oh, and of course some bug-fixing have been done too. Doors and fences will be in there it too!

(from http://mojang.com/2012/01/08/where-is-my-update/)

No mention of hostile mobs, infinite terrain generation, or caves and explicitly no crafting.

No, the Mod API has little to do with installing mods. It has to do with how the mods themselves interact with Minecraft or each other. Forge is an API, for example. ModLoader is an API. An official API might have some gui niceness that the current community-built ones lack, but by the time it's actually done I expect that the community ones will already have advanced that far.

Honestly not quite sure what they can do apart from incorporate things from existing community projects. At this point, with epic mods like Buildcraft already defining the scene any limitations introduced by an official mod API will just discourage modders from actually using it.

Sorry if I am duplicating any earlier posts; I'm not reading 28 pages to see if someone else already said this. Here's my one "amazing" reason:

Because modders can change it and Mojang's time is better spent finishing new features and polishing their vision of the game than making existing features optional.