A content management system is many things. THe current CMS package was designed to handle almost any situation. It could accomodate a magazine type workflow, or a simple workflow when admins directly publish the changes.
The user interface of the current package exposes some of the internal workings of the content repository to users. It was desinged as a tool. See cms-news-demo which was one alternative interface designed to CMS.
There is an effort to clean this up and build an easier to use content management system. Right now the closest thing in the toolkit is edit-this-page which is used to publish some of the pages on OpenACS.org.
