I'm maintaining a GitLab instance for my team at work and it's been really great for us. I am pretty disappointed that the CE version doesn't include GitLab Pages, though, as that was the one feature I missed most from GitHub and GitLab Enterprise is outside of our budget at this time.
At a previous company, we did this in GitLab with a simple post receive hook that just checked out the gh_pages (or gl_pages) branch on a webserver configured w/ rewrite to serve at a proper path. We even were able to do one better and allow PHP since it was self hosted and we trusted the committers.
I understand, but that's just not an option for us. I don't resent them at all, they've every right to decide which features are restricted to EE licenses, but I can lament it all the same.
As people can use GitLab Pages on GitLab.com for free, we felt the ability to host your own static pages was more interesting for larger teams, hence our decision to bring it to GitLab Enterprise Edition.
