Here's something I've been working on for the past week or so, inspired by the fact that it'd be nifty to have a functional audiocd-kio slave on Mac too. Digikam would also benefit from being able to distinguish removable drives on Mac.
I have thus focussed on implementing IOKit backend support for drives, discs and volumes. The audiocd kioslave doesn't work properly yet, but I feel the IOKit backend additions and changes are now at a point where I can present them to collect feedback while I undoubtedly continue tinkering (and cleaning up here and there).
There are evidently changes between how IOKit and (say) UDev and UDisk2 organise things. One notable difference is with optical devices: disc and the useful/interesting part of the drive show up in the same entry, with (audio) CD tracks appearing as additional "devices" (much like how the partitions of a harddisk are listed).