if you disable X & Gnome in package selection, for obvious reasons, firstboot doesn't run. This is a bit of a disaster given we've moved things like user account creation, selinux config etc etc there, as this now doesn't happen. Perhaps if a 'console only' install is happening, we should run firstboot at the end of the install before we reboot ? (I hear the screams of horror already).
Blasted firstboot apart into a little X-less subpackage. Now to just wait for other stuff to get done to make sure it's installed. Bug 178356 is keeping track of that.