Just saw a great demo on planning sites and found out how to use managed paths to create site collections in a web application that do not have to be the /sites/ path. I'm guessing this was the intended approach in SPS 2003, but having never seen it before it's really alleviated a lot of the problems I'm used to running into.

Things to know about managed paths

• Managed paths allow you to create another option besides /sites and /personal. 
• Exclusions - I basically used managed paths in SPS 2003 to exclude paths for virtual directories in the SharePoint site. This isn't necessary in WSS/MOSS anymore since it's built on ASP.NET 2.0.
• Wildcard inclusions - this allows you to create many sites under the named path. The default is /sites, but you could easily have /itservices or /hr for a site collection that has many IT Services or HR sites.
• Explicit inclusions - this allows you to create a site collection with the name you apportion. Creating the managed path /itservices makes SharePoint reserve the path. You can now create a new collection under the site and apply quotas and expiration.

So, as you can see, the fable of being stuck with using /sites is no more (maybe it never existed)!