sorry I didn’t clarify it, It is not passing raw Model instance back, instead its passing a instance of custom data container “DataObject” class, which happens to have hidden reference to respective Model..

for the “abuse” issue.
You have to explicitly define and allows which Model methods is a callable in the object instance(DataObject Class) http://bin.cakephp.org/saved/25937 scroll down to see the implementation of DataObject class,
Its very similar to attr_reader in ruby, unless you have define them, methods are all private, (make it pretty hard to abuse, since abuse type coder are lazy)

for instance, Person::is_healthy() method hide underlying detail of person’s health record, but perform logic according to his (medical record, current health status) to determine and return a boolean. its a prefect example of leaving these logic inside model, (can be calculated inside controller, what happen if there are many of those, you see? i am trying to do something different)

Then the person object is very useful in view.

{% if not person.is_healthy %}
dude you have a problem
{% endif %}

PS: the syntax is H2O template engine i authored. a whole shebang of django port but compiles down to native php, very fast. if you interested. svn.idealian.net/h2o/branch/0.2

My goal is to pass this object straight to Views (in my case templates)
the goal is so following is possible in my templates
page is a object instance returned by Page model,
{{ page.title | capitalize }}
or even
{{ page.get_related_pages.first.title }}

where get_related_pages is a method in Page model return list of page objects, print out first item’s title. (yes that was django syntax in php)

there is my very rough post about the details ObjectizeBehavior, sorry for poor writing but interesting stuff
http://idealian.net/?p=3

gwoo has a simpler approach
http://bin.cakephp.org/saved/1237