The Standard says a lot of things about instantiating templates, but it seems to me to miss out on saying essentially what it actually means. The closest is at the start of [temp.spec],
The act of instantiating a function, a variable, a class, a member of a class template, or a member template is referred to as template instantiation.

I think it could be good to add immediately before or after that something like:

Instantiating a template-declaration with a given list of template arguments transforms the contained declaration into a declaration for a specialization of the template, in which each non-pack template parameter has semantics determined from a template argument and each template parameter pack is associated with a list of template arguments ([temp.param], [temp.arg]). The transformed declaration specifies semantics for the template specialization. [Note: The transformed declaration of a specialization is not found by name lookup, but declares the entity named when a template-id names the specialization ([temp.names]) or when template argument deduction determines a specialization ([temp.deduct]). - end note]

Worth writing a DR or short paper? Corrections, additions, bike-shedding?

Thanks,
Andrew Schepler