Hi Thad
Freebase simply decided to not keep Wikipedia topic pages that simply held "lists of entities", but instead Freebase liked to easily generate those same "lists of entities" by using queries. There was no need to have hand coded lists in Freebase. It was a graph database and could generate all kinds of lists programmaticlly for a user, and keep those lists as views against our user profile for easy tweaking or re-use when we wanted to. (stored user queries)
We also plan to have "Query" entities once (in a dedicated namespace). They will be equivalent to current Wikipedia List articles but will be generated automatically by some kind of (SPARQL?) query. [1]
What we might consider is adding sitelinks to those entities as well and allow linking to Wikipedia pages that use this Query. This way we would still be able to serve Wikipedia's needs of linking corresponding pages on different sites while they are in a place where they semantically make sense and don't conflict with "real" items.
Best regards Bene
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Glossary#Entities.2C_items.2C_propert...