distribution profiles

Has anyone been working on an indymedia installation profile?

My name is Gus Austin. I'm a musician, self-taught web designer/developer, and relative newbie to Drupal.

When Dries predicts,

there will bring a small tsunami of Drupal distributions built around a hosted service model...

Is he talking about providers, like Bryght or CivicSpace, serving up a wide array of custom distributions and related services as a value add to their customers? What I don't quite get (assuming I'm reading this correctly), is if and/or how their distributions would be different than any distribution properly borne out of, and freely available to, the community. In other words, in addition to the convenience, specialized skills and services, will there be profiles/distributions that only will be available thru certain providers?