I just saw the new buttons after updating.
It seems to work on point-text better than area-text.
So, while they might have added new scripting commands along with this feature, to my current knowledge there's no scripting way to do this, yet. But there's the next-best way which only adds a tiny bit of time to your script execution: you first duplicate your text in question and convert it to outlines. The characters, even if they are made up of several non-touching shapes, should all transfer over into compound paths. Thus you can get the bounding coordinates as you wish. I bet under the hood, they do the same thing but are using the powers of C++ plugins to do this ultra-fast.
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