Hello Charles,
Some unofficial Debian AMIs are already being produced, see http://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2Image
I have updated that list with the most recently created images in all regions. Thanks for reminding me of it
To enable secure SSH login, booting after kernel update, and other tasks, some init, grub, and perhaps other scripts are needed, and if they were wrapped in a Debian package, then the production AMIs could be fully automated from whithin the Debian operating system.
All of the configuration file customizations that were necessary to setup those images are inside my git repository here:
https://github.com/tomheady/ec2debian Instructions on how to manually create the images are here: https://github.com/tomheady/ec2debian/wiki/64bit-ebs-ami-pvgrub I am using debootstrap to create the images from scratch.
I am still a beginner in the field, but if help is needed, I volunteer to co-maintain such a package.
The files and instructions are there, if you want to create a .deb for it, hack away!
Feel free to let me know if any of my setup instructions are unclear. Tom