What else do you think is happening under the hood when you use a CM tool like, say, Ansible? Ansible translates your configuration to small Python scripts, uploads them to the remote host and runs them.

What I'd like to see is a "script dump" output that still lets you create your yml configuration but converts it into shell scripts that you can call from your Dockerfile without any dependencies.

Of course, now you have an additional build step... and what could you use to tie everything together? make/make build :)