It would be nice to use this feature for briefly checking out what packages will be available after an image build, e.g. core-image-minimal. This can possibly be done by enabling the build history, asking for the dependency tree and so forth, but none feels really "native" about getting only the information you need. Today, I just came across again to check if a package was available for an image (core-image-minimal in this particular scenario), but I have no simple way to do so as of today.
I presume the request is the package list *to be installed* in the image. This is a subset of the packages built by an image target (native tools, etc). "bitbake -e [imagename] | grep IMAGE_INSTALL=" is *almost* what you want, apart from that the bulk of that list will be package groups and need re-expanding.
We now deploy a full package manifest alongside the image.