I know they said it won't have a blog/CMS initially but I'm looking forward to when it does. I suspect that will be my conversion point.
That pretty much sums up my opinion also. I currently use CMS from vB4 and I'm looking to make it the entrance page on
my website altough still a lot to do on url, style, speed, content, ...
I'll elaborate on this...
Why the need of a CMS: Our revenue comes from advertising, CMS is another good possibility of displaying ads, advertisers also tend to prefer other formats than forums to place theire ads, they give it more value, at least perception for forums from advertisers is that it is a bunch of kids or geeks that do not have a potential interest for them.
On the other hand to use a forum you have to have some knowledge of internet browsing and still you'll loose a lot of the content of a forum (unless you are addicted and spend hours on it, and still it depends on how big it is), thus a CMS is ideal for 1. your audience that does not know how to navigate trough a forum and 2. to enable you to present the most important content to a casual user that will be able to find and read it without deep browsing.
Having it integrated has advantages and disadvantages, at least that is what I learned from vB4...
Biggest advantage is one login common to platform, being able to promote users to publishers, editors, etc, all in one commom user db, upgrade sw and management is one process only, etc.
Disadvantages also come into, at least on vB4 I now have a slow cms, and I am unable to split it from my db/http server (at least with my knowledge), thus we are evaluating switching the cms to wordpress (with some amazing out of the box themes).
I still have a lot to optimize on my forums as it is for me almost a part time and I do not have neither the time nor the knowledge to do it but nevertheless what I look for is scalable alternative very straight forward.