Think of the scope as data that is live bound to your component and nothing more. As alex said, there is the events property for placing custom DOM manipulation. There you have access to the dom and scope, it's more like the way you are used to working with can.Controls.
I'm starting to think of the use of "events" as a bug in can. There are a few reasons why you might need to use it, for example if you need to modify your component's attributes, but in the future hopefully most of these reasons will be baked into the templates.