Well, here is something interesting and I wonder if others are experiencing the same thing. I have fixed this issue but it wasn't how you would think. It seems that the issue I had was not caused by the Altiris software but Silverlight. The server had Silverlight 4 installed before SMP was installed and for some reason when I launched the console it didn't realize that Silverlight was there. I tried to open the console on another machine and with another user and the same 7.0 console was shown. I uninstalled silverlight on the server and then launched the console and the "Requires Silverlight" page showed up. I installed silverlight from inside that page and finally the new console was displayed. I then went to another machine and sure enough, the new console is displayed.
It seems that there's a hook somewhere that enables the new console but possibly isn't active until Silverlight is installed from the console itself, at least in my case.
BTW, even though Activity Center was installed, I uninstalled it a re-installed it to be sure using this KB article: http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO47285
The new console was not working even after the re-installation until I ran the steps above.