I haven't been able to test out the image to verify if it's "clean" or not, but OP, if you're serious about distributing these images you could consider starting bitcoin-d automatically on boot with a cron command or with init.d.

I think a better alternative to distributing images would be distributing a .sh file that automatically installs bitcoin-d, and updates/upgrades the OS in the process as well. It's easier to verify that a .sh file is clean than it is with an entire disk image.