Hey Grumpy, and Jon,
I've seen over the years that most "production" instances of a web site are run in a segmented/partitioned environment, that is separate from your content development environment. With Alfresco there are actually two (2) ways to accomplish this.
The first way would be to copy the Alfresco runtime repository (AVM) out to your production web stack, and either map directly into it via CIFS (with your web app server), or to use the AVM api to gain access to the content you want to deliver.
The other option would be to extract the content from your staging area (or wherever you agree is the content that is golden and ready to be seen by the public) to a directory structure that your production web application server can see. You can use CIFS and a file copy application (FTP, SFTP, SCP, etc). We (Eye Street) have also developed a content deployment mechanism that will deploy from one server to one or more servers.
I hope this helps!
Brent Kastner
Eye Street