As a current PhD student working in this area, I caution you about getting too excited about the Emotiv EPOC. We've got one in the lab we've started to work with as a potential low-cost EEG system. The out-of-the-box software is kinda hokey, so you may end up with an expensive novelty you use once or twice.
On the technical side, it does seem to be the best current option for consumer EEG, though most of these devices are actually strongly influenced by, if not heavily reliant on, facial muscle movements.
Agreed. Although there are many videos online of using the device successfully, the people who tried it in our lab found it/themselves very difficult to train. And it was due to lack of trying...we very much wanted to control things with our minds.
A friend of mine bought the developer-prerelease version a year ago(it has extra 2 electrodes), it is very hard to train, he got some success, but basically it is a novelty, can't really use it as a practical device.
Also there was a rather restrictive licence on the out-of-the-box software, which is not very productive for a hardware company.
No, I haven't, though I'm interested in which library are you referring to. We've been developing our own Python wrapper interface to their API, though this is to share a common interface with the other EEG DAQ (e.g. g.tec) Python wrappers we've been developing.
(I've heard a few people make similar complaints to yours, which is really really saddening to me. Regardless I'm still going to buy one and see what I can do with it :))
On the technical side, it does seem to be the best current option for consumer EEG, though most of these devices are actually strongly influenced by, if not heavily reliant on, facial muscle movements.