I find most of the good stuff comes from "Ask questions like crazy" - which is true even in subsequent sessions. Springboarding off character creation is a start. But, then the real setup is asking questions imo.
I agree! Most of my most useful stuff came from that technique. On the other hand, when I started a game with some other players, even my best attempts at being as provocative as possible, at getting to the nitty gritty of what makes a character go, what makes him or her vulnerable, et cetera, I'd be answered with more generic world building answers or responses like "Well, I don't really know, that depends what the world is like". I'd respond "that's what we're figuring out! I just gave you permission to decide!" but it went against some trad game instincts and was of somewhat limited success.
On the other hand, in the second session of that particular game, some MC love letters got the players into the spirit a little more, and we had some juicy inter-PC conflicts of interest and genuine motivations to play with. I essentially said "I want to make sure I have the mechanical effects of a mixed success or failed beginning of session move" since the only beginning of session move I had to play with was the operator's, and my operator's player is extremely conservative (he'll only ever take 1 gig so that he minimizes the possibility of any gigs becoming catastrophes).
To bring this back around to more general system-theory discussion and not just talk about some AP, I agree with what was said earlier in the thread about the role of system in provoking interesting conflicts and situations and reconciling character conflict of interest with player unity of interest. I think since AW's tools for this are so flexible and "toolkit" like, they work better once you have specific material to work with. By way of contrast, IAWA gives some very specific situation material with implied conflicts built in via system, and so it's quite easy to jump right into the face stabbing and sexing and so forth. The broader, "use it the way you need it" MC rules of AW are probably more widely useful for rich, meaningful conflict and play, but take either a) highly motivated players willing to provide lots of the "moving pieces" (to use Christian's term from earlier) or b) more time to flesh out and generate those "moving pieces".
To support that, I'd point to my recent experience with creating "formal" threats and fronts. I had only MCed first sessions/one offs up until recently, and actually sitting down and cooking up threats and fronts did *a lot* to help me figure out how to push the interesting situations, so that's a great system tool. But for me at least, I needed the raw material (the NPCs, some things that had happened in the first session, revealed ares of inter-PC tension to push on) to go with them. To be fair, AW tells you that it works best as a campaign game, so I can't gripe too much about the lower amount of hand holding for game-start initial situation generation.