As one of the early adopters of the "Dream Team" ticket, I love both Barack and Hillary equivalently for different reasons and believe in their own ways are great Americans and Democrats.
That being said, I gave up on the Dream Team after Obama won the nomination and was happy with Joe Biden who helped with winning the Blue Collar vote that was a weakness in his campaign. There were many reasons for Obama not to pick Hillary for VP but the biggest one that I agree with is that for every vote and state she put in play she may have alienated other states. So while she may have put in play AR and WV the mountain West would have been jepordized. In addition, there may have been vetting issues during the campaign and risks that the Republicans could bring up past WJC issues distracting from the campaign messaging.
So Obama brilliantly used the Clintons where they would be helpful to win the election but not enough to draw fire from Republicans. What a great strategy.
As it turned out, Obama was able to win most of the states that Hillary would have helped him deliver without her. Now that he is POTUS-Elect, what to do with Hillary. Well one of the substantial differences that Obama has with Hillary is how to implement healthcare reform. And there is some bad karma from her first failed attempt at healthcare reform. Hillary would want to be involved to remedy her key failure during the WJC administration and that might galvanize those on the right to fight harder against its passage and indeed even bring up past lobbying campaigns (Harold and Louise Commercials) against major reform.
Despite Hillary's voting record in the Senate on AUMF by the end of the primary, their future policy objectives were not significantly different. So taking Hillary out of the Senate is taking a potential roadblock to passing the Obama agenda out of the Senate and putting her on his team talking to foreign policy based on POTUS Obama's direction. This would be giving her a historic position in a potentially great administration and bring together many of the left-over PUMAs who were worried about Obama's potential "peacenik" pressures of that portion of the Democratic party.
When you have an potential roadblock on a new major initiaitive (in this case "Change")...the best thing to do is get those who may be part of those roadblocks onto your team and make them part of the change team. Which is why I love putting Hillary as SOS. It would also force WJC to liquidate any of his investments in companies that may be a conflict.
As much as this pains the Kossacks who hate Hillary and WJC, this is simply the most brilliant political strategy for change that Obama could ever come up with...much better than putting Hillary on the VP ticket which would have muddied the waters in the election...may have helped or not we will never know.
In the end, I suspect that many of the Obama administration high-level appointments that cause DKos consternation will be born of the same political calculation...take your roadblocks and turn them into allies for Change