The combination of strongly typed content (page types) and widgets is a great start. A good example would be wanting to show the top 4 news articles on the home page. Under your /News section of your site you have news articles. The News page displays 20 news articles at a time, with a button to progressivly load more.
On the home page a widget is created that allows the editor to
- select where the news items are located (path in the content tree),
- enter how many items they want returned (number),
- 2 properties to generate a link to "view all" news items
Once the widget is placed on the property, it grabs those 4 items and places a "view all" link at the bottom of the list that links to the /news page.
There are other ways to do this as well but this is a simple, commmon approach.