What is the benefit of creating several different applications that share data and work together over creating one application with all the functionality spread out over several tabs? (ALSO, from what I am viewing in the tutorials all the applications share the same database? - Is that correct?)
1. Single application may become unmanageable - we have customers with 100+ objects, they would not fit in single app.
2. You can package apps with seed data records - that's probably what you've seen.