Object RTC is developed by a community group at the W3C. It includes people from Google, Microsoft and a number of telecom companies, amongst others http://www.w3.org/community/ortc/
I've just started reading up on ObjectRTC but I believe it plans to offer an API to replace SDP too and Microsoft has moved to it since it's similar to their CU-RTC-Web proposal. All in all, it looks like this will delay the adoption of WebRTC everywhere but will be for the best in terms of API and developer experience in the end.
That's not what I normally conclude when I think "text-based."
Here is a more detailed rationale for this API: http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-raymond-rtcweb-webrtc-js-obj-...