I ran across a situation and thought I would post some of the time saving management possibilities of feature stapling in SharePoint 2007.  The situation was a typical issue where there needs to be a lot of sites that have the same general features and layouts for default creation when auto provisioning the sites.  In this situation there was a need to automatically provision a SharePoint site for every Account entity that existed in Microsoft CRM.  Therefore, there would be a SharePoint document library, a default number of lists, some custom lists (stapled as features) and a custom homepage that displayed information.  The solution to this is SharePoint Site Definitions (not to be confused with templates).  By using a custom site definition these sites were able to be programatically created and updateable after the point of creation.  The question came in though that certain sites would need additional items and those additional items would be an ever growing number of lists, calendars, custom web parts, etc... that may not apply to all sites in the definition but would apply to more than one.  In comes features...<!--more-->

To add to the confusion, a non-developer/admin user would need to specify the list format, columns, etc... and be responsible for the ongoing setup within the different CRM integrated accounts.  This is where feature definitions and stapling comes in to solve the problem.  By allowing the end user to create a list to their specification in a single site (for instance your test site).  The developer and Administrator can use the SharePoint Solution Generator to select that list and create a custom list definition project in visual studio.  Take that same project and wrap it as a feature in a SharePoint site definition.  I will spare the implementation details but for those that want to know exactly how I suggest this entry.  <a title="http://blogs.msdn.com/vesku/archive/2007/03/23/controlling-navigation-options-from-the-onet-xml.aspx" href="http://blogs.msdn.com/vesku/archive/2007/03/23/controlling-navigation-options-from-the-onet-xml.aspx" target="_blank">http://blogs.msdn.com/vesku/archive/2007/03/23/controlling-navigation-options-from-the-onet-xml.aspx</a>. 

The end result... the non-admin now has his/her list (or other type) available in the features section of any site that utilizes the site definition it was stapled to.  Instead of having to recreate the functionality in all the sites.  The end user is able to simply activate it in the site features section.  This automatically adding it to the navigation, pages and areas specified in the feature.