The portal package configuration tool is, indeed, only available to admins. Because it affects everybody. That's the way it should be.
At the moment I've not supplied a "My Account" or "Configuration" portlet for users. But the code's there, it's just missing links. If you know your portal_id you can visit the portal-configuration page ... just say "?portal_id=[your portal id]".
This will come. Thus far I've been mostly interested in structure, cleaning it up.