I know about Max 4 Live, but as I see it, it's kind of a different thing. Yes, it will probably be able to interface with Live to do all the stuff which people do now with LiveAPI. Some even think that M4L may not even go through LiveAPI, and use some internal interface instead (since Ableton and Cycling 74 are developing it together). From the promo videos on ableton.com site I think that M4L will mostly be about making and modifying sound, and not so much about controlling/reading other instruments, effects, clips etc.
I would not say that LiveAPI project is dead, because a lot of hardware MIDI controllers rely on LiveAPI to do some auto-mapping magic. When you look at the MIDI Remote Scripts folder in Live, you'll see that each controller has it's own folder with a python script. So I definitely think that LiveAPI is going to stay, and that this door into Live will remain open. They even created a new folder called Framework which contains some newer code, probably required for the new Akai controller to work with Live (that is what people believe in theory).
The application I plan to use the playing clip's name is called vvvv, so I don't want to have to bring Max into this, because it is not really needed.
I had some success with someone's modification of the original LiveAPI code, but only worked when I request all the clips' names, not when I asked for just a single one. I didn't have time to play with it later, and the thing for which I was preparing this has passed. I plan to work that out eventually, but it's not that urgent anymore.