I've written a small script that should basically bootstrap any modern .rpm based distribution in to a given directory. I've currently only tested it with Fedora Core 4, as that happened to sort of be at hand at the time.
The script relies on bash, sed, rpm, grep, sort and uniq... so, basically things that are available on most linux boxes (or at least can be installed simply).
The current release is: rpmbased-dist-chroot-0.1.1.tar.gz