First, thanks to Snoober for the links via facebook, haha. He posted links for some very interesting things. I encourage everyone to check them out.
Passing on some info
Archived thread 1251124 from Maine Team - US. Markdown source: Maine_Team_-_US/thread_1251124_Passing_on_some_info.md
I read about those at Ars Technica a while back. Really neat stuff. SUSE Studio looks pretty cool for creating your own distro or an appliance.
For setting up an "appliance", I like Turnkey Linux (based on Ubuntu). It's great for quickly setting up a virtual machine for testing.