Seems like, if the President were interested in "now", they would have been working on this for going on 3.5 years, and would be actually publishing some APIs.
If the President of the United States wants to be impressive -- and I don't know that APIs are where one would start -- he can do better than make announcements.
For example: http://ideascale.com/userimages/sub-1/736312/ConOpsFinal.pdf is a document (Dec 2009) documenting the vision for Data.gov, and http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/mem... is a memoranda from 2009 that first started requiring the online sharing of major datasets.