Can I use Vagrant to build out my production server too? Or would I just use Chef/Puppet/Ansible with the same playbook/recipe on both my Vagrant powered VM and non-vagrant powered production machine?
When I'm good to go, I use Packer with the same Salt configuration to build an image and push it to AWS/DO/RackSpace as needed. Makes it super easy to develop and deploy on exactly the same machine, and the Vagrant/Packer configurations are typically fairly minimal so there's very little set-up time once you've written out your Salt/Puppet/etc configurations.
Look into packer for building out Production images, and Chef/Puppet/Ansible for additional configuration ontop those images.