Best practice dictates that we develop in a dev farm, move to test/qa for user testing and verification before deploying into production. Why doesn't SharePoint Central Administration enable this process and encourage best practices?

We need an OOTB method to both 'refresh' dev & test environments from prod and to easily promote content, lists, libraries, pages etc. from dev to test and on to prod farms. Publishing is not the answer for everything, third party tools work but this is something that should be standard behavior in an enterprise software such as SharePoint.