I had the same problem as you describe and I got SDL, SDL_image and SDL_ttf working after some research.
It seems that the configure file exists only in the source code packages. I found that out after I downloaded the SDL_image source. So, the problem probably lies in that the configure file comes only in the source packages.
However, I'm having other problems so I'm not sure this has fixed it for me, but it seems like it should.