master/slave replication, load balancing?

I've been looking at the replication module for 5 and am wondering if this functionality was built in to 6. If so, where? I read an article posted 11 months ago by Larry Garfield to his blog entitled "Drupal 7 database plans." In it, he speaks of his intention to build replication in to v7 but there's still no mention of 6. I've attempted to use MySQL's own master/slave replication by experimenting with excluding various tables but perhaps I have the wrong combination? What are people using to load balance Drupal sites? We have an f5 BIG-IP for our main site (mostly J2EE) and in a purely balancing scenario it seems to do ok when simulating it with Inlab's "balance" app. Ideally, we'd like to have a master internally where we can stage our data then have it replicated automatically to the slave that the public will use. This would allow us to schedule publications like 8am press releases, etc. One suggestion that I turned down was to have the public site be read only but that would lose access to things like the caching core module and recording of view counts, etc. Any suggestions will be most helpful as I'm at the point of ditching Drupal altogether and using something like Liferay or Alfresco since J2EE apps tend to be designed with scalability in mind. I like what I've seen so far of Drupal so far, however, and appreciate a lot of its features.

much thanks,
Gary