It turns out to be simpler without Xcode -or, said otherwise, having had to expand Laurent's example to support relationships, I had to understand core data from the inside, i.e. from the meta programming point of view - turns out to be quite useful. This is an area of the Apple doc I had never to dig through before and I now understand core data better.
The Games sample uses two methods to retrieve objects. The simplest one fires an NSRequest and returns the results as array (.objects).
The more complex one returns an NSFetchedResultsController (.controller). Think of it as an impedance adapter than provides an UITableviewController like interface and splits objects by section for you (this would a hash in ruby).
Read the doc for these two classes.
What I like about creating core data models in ruby is that I do not have to open Xcode again. It suddenly feels a lot lighter. YMMV