An interesting article from the Lone Sysadmin concerning virtual appliances and his love/hate relationship with them. I agree with him pretty much across the board, but I’ve added (and he has graciously made a comment note of it) a fourth point regarding localization.
Pretty much all of the virtual appliances out there come with the US QWERTY layout by default, but almost none of them include the Linux kbd package which would let me select an alternate layout. For those of us that work in the rest of the world and have corporate password policies that require complex passwords, this is a real problem.