Make Page Act Like Home Page

I have a custom homepage template, and I’m trying to create a page that looks and behaves just like the homepage if the default settings were used…

…The last 10 full-text posts, with permalink structures to access the single post, and ‘previous’ ‘next’ links, ect.

Basically I’m trying to make it look like the site’s blog is on mysite.com/blog, but it’s really not. The post permalinks will still looks like mysite.com/post1, just that the fake blog homepage is actually just a page template. Does that make sense?

Typically I would just have a static html page for my homepage, and then put the WordPress install in a “blog” directory, but this is going to be part of a multisite, so that’s not an option.

I thought I could just make a quick ‘archives’ template like this, but having trouble. I also tried copying the code of index.php of my template into a new template page thinking I could use the loop, but not having any luck there either.

Any suggestions on how to pull this off? I’m just using the default TwentyTen theme.

thanks!