Vista's deployment tools are hands down the best that Microsoft has released for managing Windows deployments to date - and so far really I'm only talking about SysPrep and ImageX.  We are going to make a concerted effort with Windows Server 2008 to maintain reference build images of our server configs so we're certain we're getting the same config on each of our servers, something that we hadn't been able to focus on in 2003.  Here's a highlight that impressed me this morning...

1. Build Windows Server 2008 Standard Server Core installation
2. Log in, set a basic password
3. cd \Windows\System32\Sysprep, run Sysprep.exe
4. Use OOBE mode, generalize the OS, and click OK
5. On reboot, boot from your Windows PE media
6. Run ImageX in capture mode (with max compression) to take an image of the SysPrep'd Server Core installation

This resulted in a 340MB image that when applied back to the server takes less than two minutes to install!  When imaging completes and you reboot, the SysPrep wizard will prompt you to accept the License Agreement, and then allow you to set the computer name.  You're then presented with Ctrl+Alt+Del, and on logging in the first time must set your Administrator password.

To extend this a bit, you could use a SysPrep answer file to assign an IP or join a domain, which I'm doing manually right now.  However, this points to a bright future where server provisioning can be just about completely automated.  I can currently roll a Standard Server Core image out and be logged into a command prompt and ready to configure in under 15 minutes.  Nice work Microsoft!