How can I assign pages to templates like in WordPress? I've just made the jump from WordPress to Drupal, and though I love what I'm seeing there's a basic piece of functionality that's obvious in WordPress but is escaping me in Drupal- How does one, for a given page or piece of content, assign it to a specific template?  

Please note that I'm not trying to design a template for a specific content type, rather I want the ability to choose a template at the individual content/node level, in the edit screen.  

It doesn't look like this is part of out-of-the-box Drupal, so does anyone have suggestions as to how to go about implementing it?
What I would do, is to create a Vocabulary called "template" (using the Taxonomy module in Drupal core) and add some template names to it as taxonomy terms. This will allow you to 'tag' your nodes with the template name for that node.

Next, I would create a preprocess function for the node template in my theme's template.php file and add template suggestions based on the taxonomy term. Roughly the preprocess function would look like this (not working code, just an outline):

function MYTHEME_preprocess_node(&amp;$variables) {
  // Get the Term ID from the "template" vocab for the current node.
  $template_tid = ... // (figure out where that data is in the $variables)
  if (!empty($template_tid)) {
    // Tell Drupal to use the node--[template_tid].tpl.php template if it exists.
    $variables['theme_hook_suggestion'] = 'node__' . $template_tid;
  }
}


Note that I'm suggesting to add template suggestions based on term ID, not term name. If you build it like this, you can always change the term names without breaking your template files.

For more information about template suggestions, see Working with template suggestions.