For the gui-edit patch that I made some time ago to work perfectly, a
"state query" command would be necessary. Then it would be possible to
send the properties of each element to pd, and do whatever you want with
it.
How about also checking out if there would be any other alternative to
Tcl/Tk? It's still quite slow, and some not so uncomplicated things (like
a gui element in a gop) take lots of cpu for what they give.
I've been working a bunch on GUIs recently, especially [entry], so I decided to start a standard library: TkWidget. There are already a number of half-complete Tk-based GUI objects in Pd (entry, popup, ticker, button, image), this library aims to be a direct port of the Tk widgets to Pd, with all of the Tk options exposed in Pd so that they are very flexible and configurable.
I started a wiki page to start documenting ideas:
http://puredata.info/dev/TkWidget
Please add ideas, comments, etc and if you would like to help with this, join in! The next thing to for GUIs after this is to extend tclpd so that you can write totally custom GUI objects completely in Tcl/Tk.