Node Template Panel Node I am using a node template to layout a node and I want to reference content from other nodes.  Obviously I have the current node fields available to me, but I want to select any of the sites nodes.

I understand I can create view blocks and include these in the template but looking at the node tab in the panel content, there is an option to set the node, the only option being 'node being viewed'.  This kind of suggests there may be a way of references any node.
It depends on the type of reference. You can load any node-content with node_load(). The question is simply if you know when to load which nodes. This reference could via Taxonomy or Contentype or User or anything else.