Is there any management utility for multi-site deployment?
Take a look at Aegir:


http://drupal.org/project/hostmaster
http://www.aegirproject.org/


It's probably a bit more than what you are looking for, since it manages your web server vhosts (apache or nginx), which means that it kind of takes over part of the system configuration. It also works much better on Debian (with Debian packages, installation/upgrades are pretty easy.. kind of annoying otherwise).

Once it's installed, you can create your base site and clone it using the Aegir user interface (which is a Drupal site, called the "hostmaster", which is completely autonomous from the other sites you are hosting - it's just that as Drupal developers, they used Drupal for the front-end to their tool). Under the hood, Aegir uses Drush, so it's not re-inventing the wheel.

Anyway, fair disclaimer: there is a learning curve, but it has a pretty good community and it's well worth it when managing farms of small sites. It also has commercial training/support available from a few companies (listed on the project page).