I come from a Subversion background, but I am slowly migrating to Mercurial.

When starting on many of my projects, I would setup a development environment that was configured to a particular starting point in developing an app/webapp/program (much like a Maven 2 archetype, but not necessarily Java/Maven).

Later I would checkout this archetype/template project out of my svn repo by its particular path; and than export the working copy from version control by the repository; so that I could import the working copy back in to another repository without adding the changes that I made to the working copy to the base the template/archetype project.

I've tried doing the same thing in Mercurial, and I've run into a wall since I can't check out, er..um..no, clone a specific path from the hg repository.

If I want to achieve the same sort of functionality using Mecurial, what should I do?
Use tagged branches? The archetypes/template projects are very different, but I'd like to keep them in the same repository.