How do I specify the custom template for a theme?
The equivalent in Drupal 7 is $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'], which is initialized in template_preprocess_page() using the following code:

  if ($suggestions = theme_get_suggestions(arg(), 'page')) {
    $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'] = $suggestions;
  }


If you want to add suggestions for the template files to use, you should append new suggestions using code similarly to the following one ($variables is the parameter passed to the preprocess functions):

$variables['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = "page__new_suggestion";


You can also add your suggestions before the existing ones, to be sure the template file you are suggesting is used whenever other template files exist.

array_unshift($variables['theme_hook_suggestions'], "page__new_suggestion");


Clearly if the template file your code suggests doesn't exist, one of the other template files will be used.
It is also suggested to prepend the template filename with the type of the template, in this case with "page__"; the underscores used in the suggested filename are converted in hyphens before to check if that file exists.