Benefits of config mgmt over cloned VHDs ?

Hey guys,

I've been thinking about this one for a little while and wanted to get your opinion on it. This all goes back to the product I support and some of the devs asking me about whats that I knew of which could cut deployment time of our app down when deploying to dev environments. Forgive me if I leave out any details, but I'm still learning a lot about dev/admininstration in general so some of my concepts might be off...

Our app is currently deployed via a kickstart script which automates much of the installation of the product. After a few automated phases and a reboot, you're brought to a network configuration screen, which is where you put in much of the info specific to that host. There's then some more steps which are performed via a menu accessed through a web GUI, but that's not important in how it relates to this.

Our developers are getting sick of the long time it takes for our app to deploy (can be up to ~3 hours depending on the type of environment you're setting up) and want to look for a way to make this faster. I originally thought of using some sort of config management, but upon thinking more into that I'm assuming that it wouldn't be possible (or very difficult) due to how the product installs, and I'm assuming it wouldn't do much other than replace the kickstart script.

This is where I got thinking about creating a golden image of one of the deployments up to the network configuration phase and using that to deploy to new vms. Forgive me if this is something we should have been doing long ago, but due to the nature of our product we are just scratching the surface with visualization now, and it's still pretty iffy on whether or not it will properly run as a VM or not.

This all got me to thinking of the bigger picture of why use config management vs a golden image for deployments? I understand that config management also plays an important role in managing configuration drift, but I see so many people using it to set up dev environments that in my mind it's become synonymous with deployments. Wouldn't it be simpler (and faster) to just have a golden image of your app which can be cloned and deployed to new VMs for testing? ... Or am I way off the mark on this one...