That is not correct. You can create Team sites  as child sites of a Top
Level Content Management Site.

You may not be seeing other available site  templates after you create a new
content management  site because they are not enabled by default. Go to Site
Settings >> Modify All Site Settings >> Page layouts and site templates  (under
Look and Feel).

In our company, we used sharepoint only for our intranet/employee portal. We
used publishing portal as base template for our site  collection.

We noticed that there are some features which are specific  to the type of
templates. For example, we noticed that "Save as template" is available only for
Team site template and this option is not available for Publishing template
sites. If you think you will need this feature, you might have to consider using
Team site template.

I am interested to know other peoples experience in this direction.

A belated 'thanks' to those that answered this question  (Paul, John,
Liam and Chalapathi).

Some follow-ups:

> That is not correct. You can create team  Sites as child sites  of a Top
> Level content  Management Site.

Cool. Now, perhaps a better question: should I? I'm still not sure when
I should/want to use a Publishing site  instead of a good ol' team site.
They definitely make sense on public facing sites, but what's the main
benefit (if any) on things like an intranet?

> You may not be seeing other available site templates  after you create
a new
> content management  site because they are not enabled by default.

But doesn't one need to pick a template BEFORE the site is made? How
would I get to that option to pick the template from the main site
creation UI?

I have added some comments below:

Question

I'm still not sure when I should/want to use a Publishing site  instead of a
good ol' team  site.
They definitely make sense on public facing sites, but what's the main
benefit (if any) on things like an intranet?

In a current example I have created a portal, with multiple department sites
and then a load of private collaboration  sites. The portal element is the
place where we aggregate content  from various places. Let's take the HR
Department for an example. In the structure we have created a HR Publishing
Site underneath the portal, underneath this I have created the "old Team
Site" for them. The reason we did this was to break out where content gets
stored and published. One of the test cases was as follows, HR Team Member
creates a policy document based on the HR Policy Content Type and stores it
in their team site (based on the old team site template). This site is only
available to HR Staff. When this document has finished and is ready for
publishing to everyone they publish this document to their public facing (to
the intranet) site (publishing Site). The portal then uses the content query
web part to aggregate all data of content type Policy Document by connecting
to the public facing publishing sites. This means that from a security
perspective all public sites  are available to everyone and security is not
compromised on the secure private team site. It also means that each
department has a public area for their department, it gives them a little
piece of independence in the overall intranet. Hope this makes sense.

Question

Doesn't one need to pick a template BEFORE the site is made? How would I get
to that option to pick the template from the main site
creation UI?

Yes you do need to pick a template first. If the publishing site template is
not available when you click the "Create Site" or "Create, then Sites and
Workspaces" you may need to activate the feature for the publishing
features. To do this go to the "Site Settings" for the site collection
(portal) and select "Site collection  Features". In there you should see
listed the "Publishing Feature". Simply activate this and hey presto this
option is then available.

For most of the projects I have worked on so far, we tend to
use a mix of Publishing sites  and collaboration  Sites (team Sites). I often
find that it works well to have public facing sites based on the publishing
site template and then the collaboration sites underneath each of the public
sites. This allows for easy document publishing and also really good use of
the Content Query Web Part. You can restrict what templates  are available
underneath any of the levels but no matter whether you use the Collaboration
Portal or Publishing Portal as the start you can mix and match all you want.