Hi jimbrs, the tool will be fully supported by Microsoft when we have a Go Live release. For Tech Preview 1 (which just released), we only have forum based support. But it would be a great time now to test it out for your environment and give us feedback. From a security perspective, it requires admin credentials to run and you can control the port that it runs on. We are adding Powershell cmdlet support soon, so you'd be able to use those with your Powershell script, or you can just use the exe today pretty easily.
Your scenario of replicating code and content is exactly what MS Deploy does. We'd love to see you evaluate the tool and let us know what works for you and what doesn't. And keep in mind that over time, this tool (and more importantly, the framework it is built upon) will provide a lot of functionality around web farm synchronization and adding your own providers for data types that we don't support in the box.
Our first step is to release a tool that lets one sync/compare servers/sites across two locations. One can take this tool and script it to support managing multiple sites just like you've mentioned. The main guts of the deployment tool are in a .NET framework, which we will ultimately expose publically. At that point we hope to have a sample application which demonstrates use of the framework to synchronize multiple destinations at the same time.
Let me know if you have any questions. I used to be an IT Pro and worked in web hosting here at Microsoft, so I know some of the pain points around replication for web sites.
Thanks,
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.