Ummmmmm what? Events is absolutely needed, and for a number of reasons. Declarative binding of event handlers, while cute, doesn't make sense with any dom heavy use case. Event delegates are still quite relevant to say the least.
Additionally, events are the backbone of integrating with widget factories such as jQuery UI and bootstrap.
Dom event delegation aside, binding to events within your scope is pretty relevant, especially for managing deferreds. The paginate example ( http://canjs.com/docs/can.Component.html ) is a very good example demonstrating this.