At the moment when you run devtool build-image with one or more recipes in the workspace, you get all of the main packages from all of the recipes in the workspace included in the resulting image. Sometimes you may want to exclude packages or include more than just the main package, perhaps you may even want to include additional packages easily. We'll need to do some thinking on how this can fit into a user workflow; whilst it may solve part of the issue, I suspect just adding a parameter to devtool build-image is not going to be sufficient.
I've sent the basic fix adding an option to devtool build-image to specify the packages to add.
I've created bug 9387 to cover proper image customisation (which is what I believe we need here) so that we can mark this one as resolved for 2.1.