Well, A.J. I've been trying to build things around the UBB. I have accoplished this with my PHP based website. I have released a couple of the pieces (the Ported PHP based Login routines and ubbnews.php) I believe that UBB.portal is referring to a UBB specific PostNuke like interface for the main page.
UBB.portal may be taking a different direction than I am going with mine, but the solution I'm using works well for what I need it to. And my pages load pretty snappy.