THanks for the thought, but I haven't found a way to save something and I have yet to find a "save as" function on the iPad.
Once you get a document into, say, Pages, you can rename it, that that removes the original document or template. And there is no obvious way to create or save a new template to the ones in the program. Hopefully Apple has noted that having templates is useless unless you can create your own.
I've found two work-arounds in the community here. The first is to create a template and save it to an external place such as Dropbox, or maybe e-mail it to yourself and keep the e-mail around. In that case you can take the template into Pages anytime you need it.
The other way involves the import through iTunes. When you "add" a document to Pages under file sharing in iTunes and then sync, it places the file in some kind of intermediate storage on the iPad. From there you can copy the file into Pages for use. Aparently, copying the file does not take it off of the intermediate storage location until you make that change in iTunes. Once again you have a template-like feature that works, even if it is a bit arcane.
Thanks to all that have helped me figure this out. I'd still like to add an actual template, but this still works.
...Doug