You can, pretty much, do this already if you felt like it. Distros like Gentoo, Debian, and pretty much any of their descendants(with the exception of highly specialized corner cases) have package managers that download needed data from internet repositories and can be configured to start with a very minimal install. With the minimal install(about which only the most hardcore small footprint zealots with deity level knowledge of the machine's innards could complain, and they could always use Linux from Scratch instead) you can build up to what you want. To automate the process, you could create an Ebuild(gentoo) or .deb package(Debian and others) that did nothing but depend on all the programs you actually want installed. Bingo: shove normal Debian CD in drive, install minimal system, Add your custom repository, apt-get install my-entire-configuration-package, watch Apt download and install everything you want.
I bet that, with a modicum of effort, a modestly talented script jocky could put together a cute little website or program that could allow you to do this before installing the OS in question, or even one that would modify the standard ISO to include your custom package; but I've never heard of anybody doing so. My guess is that it just isn't all that helpful, really. Professional and serious amature admins build custom install CDs and packages all the time, for medium to large deployments; but they have sufficient skill that a web based interface would likely hinder more than help. For small jobs, just a computer or two, it is usually easier to just use the included tools. For example: Synaptic isn't exactly earthshaking; but it is a perfectly competent interface, at least as good as any webform. You can, pretty much, install and uninstall at your pleasure with even the slightest knowledge of that program(It's only a graphical frontend to Apt, but it does obviate the need to know which packages you want; by making it really easy to see what is available).
In short, I'd say that your idea is so good that it is stupid, in a sense. The ability to customize the packages a system has installed is so valuable that pretty much all distros already do a decent job at it(except the ones that are consciously iconoclastic about that) without any help from outside systems, so it would be a big waste of time to set up another layer of package management.
When a reviewer snipes at the included packages, they are usually concerned about the good or bad taste of the Distro's designers, which is quite valid; but not really a concern to be solved technologically. Any decent distro gives a user of sufficient skill for that distro the tools to easily install and unistall programs; what is much rarer is a distro whose designers exhibited superb taste in assembling it to feel like an organtic whole, while neither overstepping its bounds nor lacking function. That is a horribly difficult task, possibly impossible, and no tool can really give you. The reviewer isn't worried about not being able to reconfigure the distro, a distro really has to suck before that becomes impossible. The reviewer is worried about "why doesn't this desktop feel clean?" or "What would a newbie think if plunked in front of this desktop?" or "Why did they bother to ship three basically redundant Word Processing programs?"
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