...besides a lot more tools to handle look-and-feel, the site needs to be able to figure out what's important to, well, ME.

How about a portal that lets you "suck in" parts of a page from other places? If you like the World News section of the BBC, but prefer the tech section of the NYTimes, you configure the portal to grab those parts of those pages (I'm thinking along the lines of Kapow's web clipping). Throw in an RSS reader, just for fun.

Decent to-do lists and calendar/scheduling apps integrated in one page along with my email would potentially be an Outlook killer for me. Headlines should just be gravy.

Exactly! Now, if we could tie all this together, and (let's get crazy) tie in my publishing needs (my blog, my del.icio.us, whatever), you'd have something pretty kickin'.

This reminds me of aggregators...web sites that basically screen-scraped your web email, your bank account web site, any e-bills, etc. You give the site your log-in credentials for each service you want added, and then each time you log into the site, it gives you any fresh info from each source. I remember working with one back in '01 (they wanted to screen-scrape my company's 401k site), but I can't remember the name. I haven't heard about anything like this in quite awhile...