You should contact Google support team to make sure you get the correct answer, not just a reply from a man from the road.
As far as i know they dont have stopped production of the API keys- maybe best option to find someone who has one already?
If you mean SOAP API, yes... google has stopped produce it since 2006. but if you want to use other google API, you can go here: http://code.google.com/more/#products-products-android