Gaining Access To Menu of Pages

I'm sitting here staring blankly at the Drupal Menu API
reference (http://drupaldocs.org/api/head/group/menu), wondering how
to easily generate a dynamic tree menu of all _pages_ as well as the
primary menu items. I have familiarized myself with the site taxonomy
menu, and I think I more or less get how this works. But what I would
like to do is to generate a dynamic menu of pages on the site, one
that contains items that go right to a page rather than to a category.
It's a little hard to explain, but all taxonomy items (in the Site
Menu module, or even in the standard Menu system) are links to
*categories*. I'd like to gain direct access to an array of all page content nodes
as well as the top-level navigational items (template menu items) under which they fall.

The Menu documentation *seems* to be mostly geared towards gaining access
to the menu array in order to add items to it. This is very useful
for module developers, b/c it allows them to register their modules
with the menu system.

One way that I am considering to achieve my goal of a non-taxonomic
dynamic menu (god that sounds ugly) is to somehow iterate over each
top-level menu item that PHPTemplate stores (in the variables table, I
believe), and then to compare the Menu alias with the alias for pages
in the installed url_alias table;

I'm wondering if any of you have seen more elegant way of doing
this....and if I somehow missed a pre-existing module for this. Also, can I generate
a taxonomy to mirror the site heirarchy but then generate links directly to the full page
content? It seems that the system is already almost there in this regard, except for the
fact that the links generated in the menus of taxonomy items do not open page content
directy but require a two click process: click on the category, then click on the page link. If
I could use taxonomy_get_tree() to pull the items and then insert an alias to the full page path, that
would also serve my puposes.

The reason I'm interested in this approach is because I'd like to give
users some idea of what kind of pages lie below the top level
navigation (not simply by showing them categories from the
taxonomy) and to give them the opportunity to zip right to the
resource. Gaining direct access to the menu array would also allow me (theoretically)
to insert my own css stuff (ex <li id="current">). It would also be easy
to generate cascading menus based on knowing what pages fall below.

My sincere thanks to whoever is willing and able to help. Please let me know if I need to clarify anything, thanks!!