I found a couple of tips from the microsoft.public.sharepoint.* newsgroups and I'm posting them here for future reference:

Newsgroup: microsoft.public.sharepoint.windowsservices
Subject: RE: Cross-site announcements
Date: Wednesday, April 07, 2004 4:22 AM

Please follow the steps below:

1. Open and edit the subsite page in FrontPage 2003.
2. Select Insert-->Database-->Data view-->Manage catalog.
3. Add a new catalog and type the main site URL in "Location".
4. After that, you can see all the data in the main site.
5. Drag the announcement list from the "SharePoint Lists" to the sub site
page.

UPDATE: Jan Tielens went further - he actual did this and included screen shots! Thanks Jan.

---

Newsgroup: microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.development
Subject: Re: Re-Ghosting an Unghosted .ASPX Page
Date: Monday, March 29, 2004 7:58 AM

The ghost page in SPS 2003 means using the template page directly. The ghost settings will be saved in the "Docs" table. ... For this item, there is one column named Content. By default, the value for this column is "null", which means SPS will get the information from the Template. However, after we edit the page in FrontPage, SPS will save the page information to this column. In other words, SPS will use the data in the database and ignore the information from the Template.

For the default sps page, we can reset the value with the SQL commands below:

--select the portal database
use sps1_site
go
--retrieve the page id
SELECT ID FROM Docs
WHERE (leafname= 'default.aspx') 
    AND setuppath like '1033\SPS\default.aspx%'
go
--set the content to null
UPDATE Docs
SET Content = NULL
WHERE (Id = '{A3DE463E-D6E9-4A8C-A2D2-8D49562442B7}')
--please replace the id with the value on your side