Why did you think it is named "Notification" server ;-)
Ok not so easy to do in fact. NS is able to handle SNMP alerting, so if your hardware is able to send SNMP alert to the Altiris server, the server can relay & send an email. But honnestly, use a SNMP alerter directly is the same. The interest to use Notification server is to keep "history" those alerting inside the CMDB (in the inventory of the hardware).

you could send notification through that as well.

Notification Policies allow you to do a lot of things:  Create a new incident, Edit an Incident, Send a report, Run a task, Run a report, or even send an email.  You can do a lot of stuff with that.

Also the ASDK allows even further customization and you can make the NS dance, spin and even jump arond

With its ability to use an smtp relay you can always do 5555555555@mobile.carrier.com or whatever. CMS doesn't really have much canned monitoring, but Altiris does have the "Monitor Solution". I believe this is a solution purchased separately or else maybe it's part of SMS, I am not clear on that. This is more of the metrics based hardware/performance monitoring similar to MOM.

In a nutshell, CMS will be more passive i.e. daily, weekly, monthly reports to email, phone etc. My understanding is that the Monitor Solution is real-time. Maybe someone else can elaborate if that is what you are looking for.

but I've found MS version 6 to be a bit cumbersome. Version 7 is supposed to be much easier to work with, and Joe Carson from Symantec has posted some helpful videos on this site on using it. The tips the others have provided will help out as well, especially the ASDK for further customization.

Also a notfiication policy has a "Run a command" have the command be a vb script or a call to a web service to start workflow, and pass a token with the computer name. 

Using Monitor Solution v7 can run tasks on both the client agent (i.e. restart a service)  and the task server, so that can run any number of different types of jobs, including starting a workflow process, or connect to a webservice.

neil