Still no access to the current playing track which means I have to continue using last.fm which feels a bit hacky :/
You can get that via dbus from the machine running Spotify. Check out my spotify-gnome wrapper script at https://github.com/jreese/spotify-gnome
Basically, you write a simple dbus app that listens for the appropriate song-changed signals from Spotify, and then do with that as you wish. This might not be as easy on Mac or Windows though, as I've only ever used it on Linux.