I spent the better part of a week doing nothing but this and sleep, but I think it's nearly ready. If you're brave, you can go get the current one out of CVS. I warn you, it'll be minorly annoying because I got rid of the delegator (What's that do?!) module and replaced it with the Page Manager (I bet you can guess what that does) module.

First, once you've got everything, if you go to admin/build/panels you'll see the Panels dashboard. It's really just an overlay over other stuff, because Panels itself doesn't really have a UI. But it gives UI to lots of other stuff.