The Blogger interface is actually a pretty good template for that; there are a bunch of optional widgets containing different apps that you can drag into your basic bare-bones blog page. You can add a jillion things or no things, depending on what your objective is.
The particular aspect of this community that will remain a major block for a "mainstream" user is precisely that the apps are all over the place. I don't want to have 17 separate accounts, I want to have everything in one place. It doesn't have to be "centralized," logistically speaking, I just want a "wrapper" that makes it LOOK centralized.