What is the point of the "Library"?

I've been using Aperture for about two months now, having migrated my iPhoto library. Some things I love, some things infuriate me. Right now, I'm confused by the purpose of the "Library" in the Projects pane.
Unless I'm missing something, the Library seems to be nothing more then an unmodifiable collection of Smart Albums. You can't delete these, you can't add new ones in there, and you can't modify the existing ones.
In my mind, something called the "Library" should be the top-level container of all content managed by the application. Aperture doesn't seem to follow that paradigm, though.
So, am I missing something, or is the "Library" as generally useless as I've described?
PowerBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

The library is the top level container. What is confusing is that it is not shown as such (the projects are not "in" it). But then it would make little visual sense to have a single container in the projects pane -- what else would be in it?
If you select the library and import then a new project is the library is created for you. So the library icon is really a proxy for the whole pane.

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    Click to view full size
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