Yea the article tag can help. It shows the original page. However note that this probably best for

blogs, forum post, news story, and or comment.

The canonical tag is for more internal websites and primarily popular for blogs. When you say satellite pages, are you referring to inner pages of your website or other pages on other websites? Curious.

It certainly can look like this in the eyes of Google. However, if there is no mission or intent to try and scam Google of page rank, then place this tag in your header

and you should be fine.

Also any link juice associated with the page should also follow to your website.

For more info checkout this SEOMOZ post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

To add on here, creating authority to your website comes from siloing your website. Meaning your keyword research and knowledge on certain subjects will guide you in setting up many pages in your "site" that can help in passing link juice to your most top-seeded-keyword-directories. As a result, the deeper you have pages that cover specific content of a certain category, the better your authority and page rank juice will develop. So worrying about your contact page should not be a huge concern.

You absolutely do not want to no follow any of your own pages.

Yea just think above the fold for your nav and links.

You can always design-silo the website to direct your users throughout your site.

This will help keep your home page in a healthy range for the number of links and you're most important ones at the top!

Using fresh h3 tags on other pages throughout your website with simple links will help a ton!

Having your most important links in a top nav is great for crawlability and significance to Google about what directories or pages are of importance. Removing the nav is okay unless you can ensure keeping sitelinks from the home page of importance above the fold.

I professionally would avoid removing your top nav and maybe focus more on the mechanics of css/javascript-jquery to deliver better appeal to users for click-throughs and conversions

It certainly can look like this in the eyes of Google. However, if there is no mission or intent to try and scam Google of page rank, then place this tag in your header

and you should be fine.

Also any link juice associated with the page should also follow to your website.

For more info checkout this SEOMOZ post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

To add on here, creating authority to your website comes from siloing your website. Meaning your keyword research and knowledge on certain subjects will guide you in setting up many pages in your "site" that can help in passing link juice to your most top-seeded-keyword-directories. As a result, the deeper you have pages that cover specific content of a certain category, the better your authority and page rank juice will develop. So worrying about your contact page should not be a huge concern.

You absolutely do not want to no follow any of your own pages.