If you have a reasonable grasp of HTML and CSS along with a bit of a clue how Wordpress themes are constructed, they are pretty easy to deconstruct or 'reverse engineer'.
And yep "Boiler Plate" is a basic layout that is there for you to build on, or spawn 'child themes' off of it.
There is also '
Starkers' and Chris Coyier's '
Blank' theme.
I use 'Blank' as a base and added "theme support" for some of the WP 3+ core features that are not implemented 'out of the box' so have my own versions of a blank theme.
It may not look like it now, but the layout on bookemdanno.com started life as 'Blank', and was their original table based layout ( archive.bookemdanno.com ) converted to WordPress. Once you have a base to work from the rest is reasonably straight-forward.
As a 'designally challenged' individual, I simply view source, copy and paste the html structure of a layout, then put it back together in the theme. If images have been 'sliced' and the client doesn't have the originals I will reassemble them into one image again.
You can do the same kind of thing when 'borrowing' the layout of your example site. Just do a Save As... and you then have a copy of the document and it's constituent parts to examine at your leisure.