The key limitation, if I have understood things correctly, is that you currently can’t use segmentation within the API.  Which is fine when you are getting general numbers out but not when you need to create a segmented dashboard across a dozen metrics or so.  It also means you cannot get visits to groups of pages, e.g. visits which saw a product page.  However, there are a couple of workarounds.

For the first issue, you need to return to the old system of creating a profile per data segment.  So, as I have recently done, create a profile for New Visits, another for UK Visitors, one for Paid Search and so on.  Then, with your segments already created, you can easily extract top line numbers from each profile and combine to create that segmented automated report.

The second issue can be resolved through the use of goals.  Two key points to remember are goals can be created based on Head Match or Regular Expressions for page names and that they can only be triggered once per visit.  Given this, the number of goal conversions is suddenly equivalent to the number of visits in which a group of pages was viewed e.g. set up a goal for view a product page and the number of goal conversions is the number of visits in which a product page was viewed.

The API has not yet been updated with the upgrade to 20 goals so you can currently only use the API on the first 4 goals but hopefully that update won’t be far away.  Along of course, with the ability to access segmented data and also to extract the numbers from within funnel visualisations.  In the meantime, I hope these two tips are helpful.