We'd like to be able to schedule live events in a channel, in the same way we can schedule meetings in a channel.

If anything we would find this more useful than being able to schedule meetings in a channel. Meetings tend to require people to attend, so we always add people as attendees so that they receive an email invitation whereas live events, in our case, tend to be optional, and therefore scheduling them in a channel and allowing people to choose to add it to their calendar from there without sending them an email invitation would be very useful.