Yes - there is a decent talk thread describing this and also some useful ticket history to view around this here. There is also a ticket in the Atom Feed module to remove this duplicate functionality here.
Fundamentally, the issue is that there are use cases where we want to detect when something happens and react to it within the same transaction, and there are use cases where we want to only publish/subscribe if the transaction has completed successfully to ensure that messages are not sent off about transactions that are ultimately rolled back. We never got to a point (from what I recall) where the event module served both of these use cases.
Mike