Ok, part of what inspired this question in the first place was a sort of general disappointment in one of the promises of 4e... That is, the "end of the 5 minute workday". Personally, there is nothing more anti-climactic to me then having to hold back on "pulling out all the stops" because as a player I might have another encounter later in the day. But, one of the beauties of 4e is they made "daily" resources less of an "all or nothing" proposition. With Vancian spellcasting, once a wizard or sorceror runs out of spells, he is basically useless afterwards. In 4e, while he may be out of daily abilities, he at least has his at-wills and encounters to rely on. So you are never completely screwed. You may not be as ready as you would like to be for the next battle, but you will at least be able to participate. Basically, it's more forgiving then a purely Vancian system.
However, the problem with the current Healing Surge/Hit Point system is there is no way to simulate this same "not 100% but still kicking" aspect. There is no equivalent "partially-ready" state when it comes to hit-points like there is with At-Will and Encounter abilities. Some people like this, they want part of the fun of role-playing to be resource-management. Some people, like myself, don't. My GM ended up house-ruling this, allowing you to regain up 75% of your hit-points with a short rest, which made it more in line with the current resource management system of combat powers. It sort of makes sense to... if you exercise really hard to the point of being almost unable to continue, right afterwards you are barely able to do much of anything physical. You are winded, you are tired, etc. But after a half hour of rest or so, you are able to function mostly normally again... but you likely won't be able to exercise like that again until you get a decent night's rest.
But the point isn't to need the house-rule. Hence my wonders if there were any other good ways to heal when you are out of surges. I totally understand why potions require surges to use, as it prevent players from just carrying around a sack full of them. And having a limited number of healing surges kind of makes sense in terms of a single combat, as you should reach a point where you just can't fight on any further (otherwise you would almost never have any mortal danger in a combat). But over the course of a full adventuring day, it not only conflicts with what many people will probably want thematically, but it also can lead to "holes" the players can't dig themselves out of.
Perhaps a good solution that doesn't really require a hefty rules change is a Ritual that lets you regain HP, where the material cost of the Ritual is a factor of your current level... In this way, the cost could be made to scale appropriately with a character's wealth, it requires at least a minimum of contingency planning so that the players have enough purchased Ritual components ahead of time, and wouldn't be usable in combat. More to the point, it could easily be released by WOTC in a future supplement without breaking, re-writing, or errata-ing any existing rules. As it's a ritual, GMs could easily make it "unavailable" if it doesn't suit their style of play, and likely no other rules would rely on it. Until that day though, I guess we will have to make do with a "30 minute workday"...
