[snip]

The only part of this that seems unusual to me is the reliance on an
external application (dmidecode) which we currently don't ship in the
the cloud images. I freely admit to not being overly 'cloudy' so I'll
happily defer judgment to others in the community.

This is used by Ubuntu as well. The reason for this is because there are many cloud vendors/systems that are using serial devices for meta data (CloudSigma included). `dmidecode` is used for probing such that CloudInit can pick the appropriate DataSource.