Is there any way to get my page title via my template, for example a line like this;
get page_title()
within my template, that would extract the title of that page as defined on each page in the dashboard?
Use following one to get page title :
<?php the_title();?>
For POST
$page_title = $wp_query->post->post_title;
Check for reference: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/WP_Query#Properties.