. Now, is there any benefit at having the aforementioned hub within the home automation environment and Indigo. I mean, does or will the hub act as a repeater or the like...
The hub and the powermodem are not aware of each other, but all other insteon modules can be aware of and communicate with both. And the hub can perform in a much more limited fashion the same functions that Indigo does through the powermodem (such as scheduling and alerting). This means that you can have two completely independent setups in the same house, each with it's own set of functions controlling all the same modules. This can cause confusion when one system doesn't know what the other is up to, but I actually do keep a hub running in my place solely to monitor the smoke bridge to my onelink smoke alarms and flood sensors and provide an alternate phone alert to the pushover alerts I get from Indigo. Also, the hub has a much better interface for setting the sense switch options (specifically 3 way toggle) in the micromodules, unless that's been improved at 7.1; I set up all my micros at the new house back in Indigo 6.
As far as acting as a repeater, pretty much all your switches and plug modules are already doing that; I don't know if the hub repeats signals or just sends it's own commands.