It certainly would be helpful to be able to easily implement a calendar/upcoming events block in the right sidebar (and the other frameworks).
For that matter, it would be extremely helpful to have a unified upcoming events (i.e. Calendar) AND topic list as the Events category view. I mean something like this (forgive the rough copy/paste):
The current Events category sort, while clever, doesn’t do a great job of making it visibly obvious what actually are the upcoming events. It just looks like a regular topic list with a weird order.
The Yearly View on upcoming-events gets close to this, but only if hacked to hide the expired events. And it is on a completely different page, with navigation to this quite jarring.
In my mind, a combination of the best bits on a single page (as above) would work brilliantly.