I am tasked to implement a web page element that is a group of tiles that should scroll smoothly on touch devices, and support traditional scrolling via buttons in a web page:

On tablet, when a user scrolls the portfolio tiles, they should be scrolling instead of an entire page.
How can this be achieved with respect to layout/markup? Maybe you can advise an example tutorial on how similar has been implemented.
You would set a fixed height to the tiles container, and style it with:
overflow: scrolland a bit of JS as described in the links below.For more info on mobile specific touch scrolling, check-out:
http://cubiq.org/iscroll-4
http://blog.joelambert.co.uk/2011/10/14/a-fix-for-ios5-overflow-scrolling-scrollfix-js/
http://johanbrook.com/browsers/native-momentum-scrolling-ios-5/