YouTube announced its new Analytics API this year.
https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics
It seems to be targeted at content creators to report on data for their own content. Can it be used to query for view counts for videos other than those owned by the party doing the querying?
No, it can not. The YouTube Analytics API is only intended to allow content owners (i.e. individual users or YouTube Partners) to retrieve data for videos that they own.