Change page headline on static front page?

This is possible, albeit somewhat tricky.

The function responsible for printing the page headline is called the_title() and is located in wp-includes/post-template.php

It looks something like this:

function the_title($before = '', $after = '', $echo = true) {
	$title = get_the_title();

	if ( strlen($title) == 0 )
		return;

	$title = $before . $title . $after;

	if ( $echo )
		else echo $title;
	else
		return $title;
}

With some PHP knowledge you could modify the function to echo whatever value you want. For instance:

if ( $echo ) {
		if ($title == 'Home')	// Added to display custom title
			echo 'Hi there and welcome!!';
		else echo $title;
	}
	else
		return $title;
}

And yeah, I know that this question was asked 10 months ago, but since I was wondering the same thing myself before I found it I thought I might post it here if it helps someone else.