After much discussion with Charles earlier today, a couple of notes:

1) In a little bit, I will be checking in a new layout to the overall admin console. The key changes:
a) layout will no longer be css/div-based. it will be table based. the biggest reason for this was that because of the div offsets forced by the css(to get placement) there was a large possibility of stuff rendering "off screen".
b) keeping in mind that the long term goal is a portal based console, the new layout applies portal-like chromes upon the individual "portlets". the modules, themselves don't have to do anything here; the layout handles it.
c) some better style/color choices.

another thing to consider is the left navigation content. two things in particular:
1) currently it is all hard-coded. while that's currently fine as we only have 4 modules, this will become "difficult" when we have a full compliment (plus its just not very extensible).
2) again considering the long term portal objective, typically portal navigation actions render the given portlet's VIEW. Even in the struts stuff, this makes a lot of sense as we can keep the left nav clean. again, there is currently only 4 modules so its not that big of a deal yet. equated to the current struts setup, I think we should strive for the following:
a) each module should define a "/index.html" action mapping (the servlet is configured to only accept "*.html", or I'd say make this "/")
b) each module will have one link in the left nav (preferably dynamically built) which will point to its "/index.html" action mapping.