After several hours of tedious find and replace chores to rename some entities in the project I decided to work on the skinning features. In my thinking it breaks down into selectable layout templates, selectable style sheets, and selectable image sets. I think you also have to make the site header control skinnable under its own settings and make it configurable so that you can turn off the top menu if you plan to use a vertical menu on the left side.
So far today I have the page layouts on some of the pages including this one implemented using Paul Wilson's MasterPages. Now that I've figured out how to integrate it, its just mechanical work to do the other pages. The template is not selectable yet but I plan to implement that soon. Amazing how much work I did this weekend and the site doesn't look any different!