Unfortunately there aren't any quick start kits you can download today, but there is a great list of a ton of public Publishing sites here: http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/websites.aspx
As for a template, most people start with the Collaboration Portal template. I personally like to create a minimal Publishing site definition and go from there.
We've been using SharePoint for some of our intranet pages, but we're going to re-create our entire intranet in SharePoint. Is it possible to transfer existing pages (basically from one site collection) to the new intranet (a new site collection)? (I know that you can duplicate a list, for instance, by saving it as a list template, but can that be done across site collections?) Thanks.