Michael,
As you note, there was nothing like this in the Tcl CMS package, which was one of the reasons why the out-of-the-box experience was so bad. Hence the effort to have a default public UI this time around.
As you also note, I fully expect clients to want to customize this a lot. In an attempt to make this easier, the default public UI pages are constructed from smaller logical components wherever possible. So, for example, you could just pull out the "featured" component and stick it into a portal, possibly in conjunction with the "search query" component.
