Whether or not you use an SSG, I find the biggest hurdle is getting/making a good theme for your blog. It looks like this comes theme-included, which is actually a pretty big deal if you want to get up and running fast.
Yeah, Hubpress, Octopress, Jekyll Bootstrap, and at least one other I can't quite recall, are all the idea of having a preconfigured blog theme ready to go instead of having to build one from scratch (or stick with the very plain Jekyll default). They'll sometimes do things like pre-configure useful Jekyll plugins and provide additional scaffolding tools (this used to be a particularly big deal of Octopress, IIRC, for the versions of Jekyll before it added its own scaffolding system).
It's a nice to have to get started quickly when you don't want to custom build a theme or you want someone else to figure out a lot of the basic configuration.
It's a nice to have to get started quickly when you don't want to custom build a theme or you want someone else to figure out a lot of the basic configuration.