I use the Portal on my site here and I'm pretty happy with it after doing some customizing. I'm just emulating this on my version 3 test site and will upgrade later this year. As for controlling pinned topics, yeah that could be handy but it's no big deal for me. I have a news forum that only admins can start new topics. Only that forum gets used for the portal articles. Pinning is useful if you want an older news item to remain on the front page after newer news items have been posted.
3DKiwi