I will try to support as much of this as I can in Ogre, but I won't duplicate the structure or necesarily use the same terminology. Quake3 is designed for a very specific purpose and code structure, whereas Ogre is designed to be more flexible, so for example I'm likely to separate game-related properties like surface flags from the generics of materials in my implementation.
This is a utility class only - a single call to loadFromChunk should be enough. You should not expect the state of this object to be consistent between calls, since it uses pointers to memory which may no longer be valid after the original call. This is why it has no accessor methods for reading it's internal state.