Some comments in the JForum posting, as well as comments by Sheng Gu in ICE-1343 led me to investigate ice:selectInputDate. Here are the issues that I found. I'm putting these in a single Jira because I think it'll just be a huge hassle trying to address and commit these issues separately.

1. Can't clear out the text field to make no date selected. Select a date, and see that it validates, and is set into the bean. Then go clear out the text field, and tab away. It gets a null submittedValue, but the value does not become null, and the bean does not get the null value.

2. If you try to implement a Cancel button by setting immediate="true" on it, and having its actionListener null out values in the bean, it won't work with selectInputDate, because clicking on the button will also submit the form, and cause a series of interactions that will result in the date existing again. Amusingly enough, it will work with imediate="false".