Hi MattG,
In case you missed it, check out the vBrownbag from last night which was really excellent.
I'm not an auto deploy user yet, but after seeing that presentation I will say I am enticed. The presenter (rnelson0) did discuss the benefits of stateful vs. stateless. His example was using linux for dhcp so the file that contains the ESXi host MAC addresses was just a text file. Perhaps there is some windows based version that would allow the reading of a csv, or you could craft the text file using Powershell (reading the csv) and then upload that to the server and then restart the required services before deploying.
Not quite a full answer to your question, but hopefully keeping the conversation going and providing some useful resources while waiting for others to chime in.