Unfortunately yeah that's the deal man.

When I first saw what you are seeing I called into Moz and was like HEY!! What is this nonsense? That's when they dropped it on me that Google doesn't provide them that information.

So the only data you get that is actually from Google (even when you select the "Google" drop down option) is the Keyword Difficulty.

Oh no question about that Donna!

To my knowledge there aren't any tools that can/will give exact figures. But in comparison to the Moz Keyword Analysis tool (which provides BING search results), using Google Keyword Planner is about as close as you can get to an "approximate" number.

All these tools do is provide us with an idea of what to focus on. Like Rand mentioned in his post (which is great)...

"THE IMPORTANT LESSON: Running discovery-focused searches in AdWords may not show you all the valuable/high-volume keyword phrases connected to a word/phrase."

And then he goes on to recommend ways to address the challenge. FUN FUN FUN!

Yes I agree! You should strongly urge your client to add content to the home page of their site. As Bruce and Ray mentioned above, the home page is the FRONT DOOR of your site. This tells both your visitors and Google "What you do" and "Where you do it".

Always be sure to make a STATEMENT on your home page!

Having site wide links like that can look like they may have been paid for.

"I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)?"

1 link that gets relevant traffic to your site is worth more than 100 links that are not relevant to your site. It's not about how many links it's all about what type of content created that link. In other words building a natural linking profile is not link building, it's creating real content and sharing it with the right people who will help that article get real natural links.