Found one piece of the puzzle. To add views so that they are visible, the window has a method called "addSubview", seems to be similar to addChild in ActionScript. A default windowed iPhone project already has a "window" attribute in the delegate class. applicationDidFinishLaunching also contains a reference to the XIB file. A view controller has an initWithNibName method that takes the name of a XIB file.
Found an answer to the source code generation question too:
It doesn’t generate source code, instead it allows you to manipulate objects directly and then save those objects in an archive called a nib file. At runtime, when a nib file is loaded the objects are unarchived and restored to the state they were in when you saved the file
