It may seem counterintuitive, but because Ember's object model is so powerful, you don't need a lot of the model-specific sugar that other libraries provide you—it's baked into every object.
To see how easy it is to fetch records using the tools in Ember, see Robin Ward's blog post: http://eviltrout.com/2013/03/23/ember-without-data.html
It seems you're suggesting to manage your data model and wrap it with ember. This is specifically something that makes me feel squeamish. I feel like this is a distinct job for a framework, an important one non-the-less. Without it, you need to do leg work, and projects done in ember will have different implementations, a framework should provide common grammer for common things. Lastly, a data model can provide powerful features and optimizations.
I'm probably just reiterating your wish list. Just keep on baking it. :)
Thanks for the link, I've read it before, but it was nice to revisit it.