Ask HN: AMI-like speed when using Chef/Puppet/Salt?

With EC2 (and I suspect other cloud services) you get the benefit of blazing fast speed when provisioning a server launched from a ready-made AMI.

On the other hand, tools like Chef, Puppet and Salt are great at starting with a fresh machine is up-to-date and matches a target state. The problem is that provisioning a machine with these tools can often be too slow, especially when you are building software from source.

How do others using these provisioning tools reconciliate the "speed-to-ready" you get with premade images? Are there tools specifically made for helping you create and manage ready-made AMIs (and similar images for other platforms) using Chef/Puppet/Salt? What about using these tools to create secure public AMIs using the chroot build-from-scratch method used by Alestic?