There's still a bit of "manual" work to get someone up and running on our Meta appliance, so unfortunately you would have to go through our sales process. However if you just want a video or screen recording of how it works then I can put something online in the next hour or two.
For baking the machine, we use Ansible under the covers and have a set of Lisp scripts to manage everything. As for image formats: qcow2, raw, vhd (and vmdk in the .ova file).
Not trying to hijack Gravitational's thread, please contact me (email in profile, or 'aw-' on FreeNode) if you want to discuss more.