More discussion on this in IRC. Eric Hammond pointed out that with EBS volumes, you can actually stop the instance, modify the kernel and ramdisk attribute and boot the instance with new kerne/ramdisk.
This would actually provide a usable mechanism for updating the kernel in an EBS volume.
I had committed a change to remove the meta packages, but have since backed that out.
More discussion on this in IRC. Eric Hammond pointed out that with EBS volumes, you can actually stop the instance, modify the kernel and ramdisk attribute and boot the instance with new kerne/ramdisk.
This would actually provide a usable mechanism for updating the kernel in an EBS volume.
I had committed a change to remove the meta packages, but have since backed that out.