I am wondering about how deal with deciding which needs to be draw on a given cycle of my game: the game view or a menu view. In a pure OpenGL version, I would have a game state variable the would tell the render() method which one to draw.
But I am confused about how to do this in a standard iPhone (UIKit) arrangement. If I have a root view controller that controls the game view and menu views, where does the main loop belong? In the AppDelegate class, or down in the game view class? But then I would still need a way to communicate back up to the AppDelegate in order to switch between views...

Why not just do a pure OpenGL version of it and be done with it? Mixing in UIKit widgets with your OpenGL stuff can kill performance anyway. I fiddled with trying to play moderator between OpenGL and UIKit for long enough and simply gave up. There just isn't enough machine available to reliably do both IMHO. You *can*, but it's a trick sometimes, which I don't think is worth the trouble.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said UIKit...I meant MVC and all that. If I have to use a UIViewController to swap views between a game view and one or more menu views, where does that fit in with the game's main loop?

I'm no expert but I think a few developers here (myself included) have a single view for all drawing and manage the state like you mentioned in your first post as a pure OpenGL version.

I'm with monteboyd, and have only one glView and skip any MVC for games.