After writing several patches to CiviCRM's install process that will be included in CiviCRM 4.3, I think we're down to just 1 issue before building a CiviCRM/Drupal site becomes much easier and bug/notice/warning free for new sites/site builders. Because the Drupal.org packaging process updates CiviCRM as the downloadable .tar.gz/.zip are built, we are able to patch CiviCRM before downloading it. Some of these patches replicate the changes the CiviCRM team makes to external, open source packages in their build process other are changes to the Drupal specific CiviCRM files.
Patches being applied to the install profile that will be fixed in 4.3:
Change to drupal/civicrm.install to all users to install packaged starter kit install from sub directory
hook_requirement expects an array if called... even if empty
Notice: Undefined index: value in theme_status_report()
I think these changes only impact the initial install, so upgrading CiviCRM with a full download after installing from a kit shouldn't be an issue.
The last issue is easy to manually fix. It simply requires editing the CIVICRM_UF_BASEURL setting in the civicrm.settings.php after install. Still, I'd really like to get that fixed and any other issues anyone finds after installing. If you can help with this or just test the install process, I'd appreciate it. It's important to note that unlike module projects, install profiles are packaged MUCH less often. The changes I made this morning an unlikely to show up in an updated dev snapshot until tomorrow so use the 1.7 release for testing.
#1835514: Issue with CiviCRM paths after install
I've documented the process for installing Drupal and CiviCRM from a profile using the download, the no-core option, and drush make on http://drupal.org/project/civicrm_starterkit
Thanks again to @lobo for adding the minimized version of CiviCRM to the packaging process and to @denverdataman for help with the latest round of patches.