Sometimes we have a lot of blocks from views and such on our front page, going where the content usually goes, so we don't want our front page to be the /node stream. We could make it a View page but if all the other Views are blocks, it seems wrong to play favorites (and may be annoying for theming or changing things later). Plus, it's nice to have that one node for the little bit of (easily editable) static content.
Here's the function for "example" theme's template.php to remove the page title:
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