Get the number of confirmations for an external address
Looks like the functionality i am looking for is getting added to bitcoind.  Hopefully most of the devs responsible for their clones of bitcoin will update accordingly and eventually this functionality will be available for all cryptos.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2121

EDIT: Also see this pull: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2861

Hopefully it gets merged into master soon.