Got it working, thanks to Cryode and user2094178 pointing out that my directory structure was not correct to start off with. I am going to go over several of the issues that I ran into, hopefully helping others that may have the same problem. fyi, this is on Windows 7 running WAMP.
I think where things all went wrong was that I tried to install Laravael by creating a composer.json file with a require of laravel. When running composer, it didn't know that I wanted Laravel as my main project framework, so it just installed all of Laravel down in the vendor directory. There were no top-level app, bootstrap, public, etc. directories.
Scrapped this install and started off from scratch using the directions specified at http://geekanddummy.com/how-to-laravel-4-tutorial-part-1-installation/ (e.g. ran composer create-project laravel/laravel). Ran into the following issues...
1) composer/git complains about https issues. composer continued with warnings on every download but continued to download files using http. When it got to symfphony filesystem.git, it got a fatal error
Failed to clone git@github.com:symfony/Filesystem.git via git, https, ssh protocols, aborting
To resolve this I ran a small php script that output phpinfo(). Determined the location of my php.ini file and removed the comment for "extension=php_openssl.dll". I had already done this for WAMP and Apache, but found out PHP at the command line was using a different php.ini
2) Did a test of git and ssl using "ssh git@github.com" at the command line. Had an issue that it could not authenticate, permission denied. Added environment variable HOME, set it to ..
set HOME=%HOMEPATH%
After this, ssh worked and added an ssh key successfully for github.
3) Deleted the entire project directory and started back from scratch, did not see a way to recover and continue. Next issue was that I got a git error "exceeded the timeout of 300 seconds" when retrieving symfony/Filesystem.git. Fixed this by adding the following composer environment variable..
set COMPOSER_PROCESS_TIMEOUT=2000
4) Deleted entire project and started again from scratch. All was downloaded fine this time. I have the top level app, bootstrap, public, and vendor directories. Loading the laravel\public\index.php works, I see the "You have arrived" page.