For those that are in charge of your IT department, or if you are the IT department, Ars Technica has an article on how to build and maintain a tiered WSUS infrustructure. While this may be overkill on home networks (unless you are studying or playing around with AD and advanced Windows networking), it is a Godsend for business networks.
What WSUS gives you, out-of-the-box, is a way to consolidate updates on one server, distribute them out to clients, and apply only approved updates from approved categories at approved times. It also includes some useful, if somewhat lacking, reporting capabilities. However, all of this still isn