David Glick has just released collective.recipe.omelette version 0.5. You have got to try it. As you may know, it makes a parts/omelette/ directory with links to all the various eggs that you have in your buildout. With version 0.5 it can do the same for Products. And you can point it to some more packages. In a standard Plone buildout you would have this part:

[omelette]
recipe = collective.recipe.omelette
eggs = ${instance:eggs}
products = ${instance:products}
packages = ${zope2:location}/lib/python ./

Don't forget the ./ at the end. Note: the README.txt of the recipe mentions modules instead of packages but that is a typo. Fixed in subversion.

I especially like it that with this configuration you can look in parts/omelette/Products and have links to the exact same Products that your zope instance will be using, whether a Product is in an egg, in the productsdistros/checkouts directory, in parts/plone or in the Zope 2 Products dir. That is sweet.

Thanks a lot David!