Ahh... the folks that have never experienced the joy of IPS Pages from an Admin's position. The nearest thing that XF has to it would be some of Bob's add-ons, and even they are limited when compared to it. Widgets, and simply HTML will never compare to the power of it. But by the same token, that power brought a level of complexity that most did not want to mess with.
Pages was one of the reasons I moved one of my XF sites over to IPS... well, that and the classifieds add-on that was available.