Let's say you're writing a book where you publish each chapter as it is finished. You're going to use WordPress pages for your content organization, with a top-level page describing the book and then a subpage for each of the chapters in your book.
On the top-level page, in addition to the book title and description, you want to display links to each of the chapters, and a brief description of their content. This task would be difficult with a lot of other content management systems, but not with WordPress.
To properly use the techniques in this recipe, you'll need to be working with a theme that you previously acquired or developed. If you haven't started developing a custom theme yet, I recommend using the Thematic theme. It can be freely downloaded from the WordPress.org Theme Repository, at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/thematic/.