I would appreciate it if someone would help me accomplish what must be
a fairly common requirement:

From a portal topic/area I would like to provide a list of entities
(say customers) each linking to a subsite. In addition to the site
name, I would like to display additional columns of information
(say "customer relationship manager", "region", and "market cap")

Years ago I worked with another system which allowed me to configure
this sort of thing as "site metatadata" which could roll-up to the
parent site or directory. How do I do this in Sharepoint? The subsites
will live in a WSS site collection, but I currently don't know how to
associate custom values with individual sites or how to display these
values in a roll-up.