You're absolutely right that there is not much content on that page exclusive of navigation, but in its defense the whole point of the page is navigation :) And it is just one page out of hundreds of thousands of pages on the site, many of which do have a lot of content.
I like your point about leaf nodes. Many of the domains that rank now either have a small # of pages total, or are extremely large brands with a lot of "trust", however Google defines it. In fact, these factors seem to outweigh having any original or useful content on the page itself in many cases (see post below).
If the problem is about too many leaf nodes, then cutting down "thin" content nodes (pages with little content, photo pages, etc) should have a positive effect. We've done a lot of this, so it will be interesting to see if that is the case.
1) Not much content on that page exclusive of navigation.
2) Not enough site trust.
3) Not enough links pointing directly to that page, the category (state) pages, or leaf node pages, like the individual hotel ones.
Prior to Panda, a domain with a lot of links could have virtually infinite leaf node pages with no links but laser-targeted content and rank a large portion of them. These days, "lots of links to our homepage" plus virtually infinite pages with no links is a recipe for being Panda'd.
I don't think the core "top -> state -> hotel" structure is likely a problem. That sort of tree structure, with variations, is pretty much universal in large sites. Having a lot of links on a page will not, by itself, burn you to bits.