Two month ago I started to write a new iPhone Application and for this reason I created a generic RESTFul web service, which allows me to have a lot of these necessary features
For "sub operations": what about putting them on your queue, with the parent operation being a dependency (cf. -[ NSOperation addDependency: ]) of each of its child operations? The NSOperationQueue can sequence your whole pile of operations for you. I think this is simple and natural to work with.