You want a thin veneer? That's easy to cook up. Try the following trivial wrapper around ElementTree as a start:

# geetree.py
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

class GeeElem(object):
    """Wrapper around an ElementTree element. a['foo'] gets the
       attribute foo, a.foo gets the first subelement foo."""
    def __init__(self, elem):
        self.etElem = elem

    def __getitem__(self, name):
        res = self._getattr(name)
        if res is None:
            raise AttributeError, "No attribute named '%s'" % name
        return res

    def __getattr__(self, name):
        res = self._getelem(name)
        if res is None:
            raise IndexError, "No element named '%s'" % name
        return res

    def _getelem(self, name):
        res = self.etElem.find(name)
        if res is None:
            return None
        return GeeElem(res)

    def _getattr(self, name):
        return self.etElem.get(name)

class GeeTree(object):
    "Wrapper around an ElementTree."
    def __init__(self, fname):
        self.doc = ET.parse(fname)

    def __getattr__(self, name):
        if self.doc.getroot().tag != name:
            raise IndexError, "No element named '%s'" % name
        return GeeElem(self.doc.getroot())

    def getroot(self):
        return self.doc.getroot()

You invoke it so:

>>> import geetree
>>> t = geetree.GeeTree('foo.xml')
>>> t.xml_api_reply.weather.forecast_information.city['data']
'Mountain View, CA'
>>> t.xml_api_reply.weather.current_conditions.temp_f['data']
'68'

The lxml library includes a very convenient syntax for XML generation, called the E-factory. Here's how I'd make the example you give:

#!/usr/bin/python
import lxml.etree
import lxml.builder    

E = lxml.builder.ElementMaker()
ROOT = E.root
DOC = E.doc
FIELD1 = E.field1
FIELD2 = E.field2

the_doc = ROOT(
        DOC(
            FIELD1('some value1', name='blah'),
            FIELD2('some value2', name='asdfasd'),
            )   
        )   

print lxml.etree.tostring(the_doc, pretty_print=True)

Output:

<root>
  <doc>
    <field1 name="blah">some value1</field1>
    <field2 name="asdfasd">some value2</field2>
  </doc>
</root>

It also supports adding to an already-made node, e.g. after the above you could say

the_doc.append(FIELD2('another value again', name='hithere'))

If I understand your question correctly:

for elem in doc.findall('timeSeries/values/value'):
    print elem.get('dateTime'), elem.text

or if you prefer (and if there is only one occurrence of timeSeries/values:

values = doc.find('timeSeries/values')
for value in values:
    print value.get('dateTime'), elem.text

The findall() method returns a list of all matching elements, whereas find() returns only the first matching element. The first example loops over all the found elements, the second loops over the child elements of the values element, in this case leading to the same result.

I don't see where the problem with not finding timeSeries comes from however. Maybe you just forgot the getroot() call? (note that you don't really need it because you can work from the elementtree itself too, if you change the path expression to for example /timeSeriesResponse/timeSeries/values or //timeSeries/values)