Pulumi made the mistake of immediately making remote state a paid-only feature. Even if it's not, from all the recent marketing I looked at everything useful required payment; for getting started with a project that's a non-starter.
On top of that, most of the worst parts of Terraform are no longer an issue with 0.12.
Its completely possible to host your state in S3 or a filesystem; it takes a bit of setup and there may be a few rough edges, but the effort or subscription is completely worth it. The secrets management alone makes it worth it, but their programming model is definitely the future. I think the fact that AWS just released their Cloud Development Kit is strong validation of the approach.
On top of that, most of the worst parts of Terraform are no longer an issue with 0.12.