I believe the best way to handle content initialization is by writing a custom InitializationModule. There you can use things like IContentRepository and ISiteDefinitionRepository to do the majority of your work.

Yeah, that gets messy when you try to handle pages that contians blocks that contains other blocks with links to pages, etc and you need to initialize a large sites in a generic way (i.e. easy to review and modify).

I was hoping someone else had come up with a better solution that handled the page-> block -> block releationships so we didn't have to write the code.