I can answer the dashboard part. There is limited capability to create and modify dashboard templates for RTC team and project dashboards - this is done in the Eclipse client in the Process Configuration. These templates are used for automatically creating the project and team dashboards as you first visit them. Since these templates are stored in the process configuration, they are included in the project template when you export it.

For the queries, if you're referring to work item queries, then yes you can include predefined work item queries in a project template in a similar way. And these are the only queries you can use in the dashboard template because they are the only ones that are guaranteed to be available in a new project or team.