Artifact publishing task should provide most of the features of the build task.
But it is a separate logical entity of the build process.

Some features:

* ability to be triggered by one or many builds.
Example:
execute the task when all builds are successful.
execute the task when all builds are done (regardless of the result)
execute the task when one or more build are failed.

* ability to chain tasks
Example:
execute the task only after another task is finished.

Other options for external publishing:
rdist, rsync, sftp. And this has to be decoupled from the build run itself as sometimes the build needs to be validated before it can be deployed. Not strictly an aspect of Continuous Integration but TeamCity can be used to leverage deployment needs as well.

Allowing something like:

..\..\PrecompiledWebApp => C:\deployments\latestBuild

to be a valid Artifact path would be an easy place to start.

This does work for me, on a Server 2003 install of TeamCity 2.1 using the sln2005 build runner:

..\..\PrecompiledWebApp => ..\..\..\..\..\..\..\..\deployments\latestBuild

will copy the pre-compiled .NET web app in to C:\deployments\latestBuild

Current workaround is to create a separate build configuration that has artifact dependency configured from the needed configuration (or several) and run it manually or via dependency trigger.

Sample Ant script that uploads files to ftp can look as simple as this:
<project name="uploadFiles" default="upload">
<target name="upload">
<ftp server="ftp.myorg.com"
userid="anonymous"
password="me@myorg.com">
<fileset dir="htdocs/manual"/>
</ftp>
</target>
</project>
The script can be specified right in the TeamCity Ant runner configuration.

Requested in forum thread http://devnet.jetbrains.net/message/5285283
Build status (successful/failed) needs to be added to a file name.

another request in forum http://devnet.jetbrains.net/message/5302455

I wrote a plugin that will allow you to publish to a remote ftp site. http://teamcityrunners.codeplex.com/, its built against teamcity 6.5. Its pretty simple right now, but it fits the bill fairly well.

another customer tried to specify absolute artifact paths in build settings
http://devnet.jetbrains.net/message/5307868

I also tried to specify an absolute artifact path. I would like to publish artifacts for a couple VCS triggered builds, but want to exclude them from my backups. Being able to publish artifacts somewhere outside the data directory would be very useful.

also requested in http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/311611

AAARRGGHHH! Jenkins has it and we don't! The shame! The shame!
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Publish+Over+FTP+Plugin
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Plugins#Plugins-Artifactuploaders

another request for Amazon S3 http://devnet.jetbrains.net/message/5447092#5447092

Daniels plugin keeps suffering from corrupt files although there appears to be a snapshot fix for it (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NET-409 )

I'd like to see this feature implemented. I have two cases right now:

1. copy artifacts to S3 (artifact path to S3 path - ex: target/myjar-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar => my-s3-bucket/lib)
   
2. copy artifacts to a network share (currently utilizing a command line script step with xcopy)