Does the API always return question and answer bodies in HTML format?
Is there any provided way to get them in Markdown format, for easier local editing?
If not, please consider this a feature request to have that added.
Markdown won't be coming until write access, which is slated for a later version of the API.
I imagine that once write-access is supported, presumably in version 2.0, they'll have to return the markdown source along with the generated HTML.