Thanks for posting, Chris!
I hope you don’t mind that I’ve moved the post into its own thread to give it better visibility. Community feedback is a key part of how we prioritize what we work on, so it’s helpful to have the request as its own thread so it’s easier for us to gauge the level of interest in a feature. 
In the meantime, I thought you might be interested to know that you can open up Hyperlinks in modals (iframes in a pop-up). This applies to regular Hyperlink tiles as well as Media tiles which are configured with a hyperlink action. You can see an example of this in the following post:
Note that many sites have begun blocking the ability to embed them in other pages, so this won’t work for all sites. Also note that the site must be SSL enabled (https) in order to be opened in a modal. Otherwise you would need to use the Open in New Window or Open in Same Window configuration on the hyperlink.