The web analytics guide is questionable as the author/s repeatedly state in the preface that Google Analytics can only be used for page views not even tracking, which is false.
We actually have a sidenote that mentions that GA can be used for event-based tracking, but we've decided to skip over it in v1 of the guide because it's missing some critical analytics functionality. We're focused on the big three event-based analytics tools for now, but are going to add more info on tools that can be used for event-based analytics, but aren't primarily designed for that purpose, e.g. Pendo, GA, etc.
Thanks for bringing this up. Just to clarify, the base version of GA provides an event-based model. GA App+Web is a feature of GA that's aimed at sharing/consolidating info between websites and mobile devices. We're focused on the web side of things, as we've insofar only written a web analytics article. We suspect GA becomes a bigger player when we take a look at mobile analytics, but we haven't fully delved into that yet.