Is there anything natively on these devices that supports the idea of a pulse generator or single shot or anything?

I want to be able to generate a positive going on pulse that lasts for say 10 uS, I can do this with a CPU loop of course or possibly introduce a timer, but wondered if there's anything built in for this...

 

That is what timer modules do.

 

Check out RMT. It's a technology that was designed to be used with IR remotes, but can be used to offline timing to hardware for a variety of purposes.