[mkent]

Puppet also supports a 'dry run' mode to give you an idea of what changes would have been applied during a run - something Chef is lacking and definitely makes installing Chef on an already functioning machine a very scary proposition.

The built in reporting in Chef isn't very useful and the web ui is pretty light, but there's at least hooks and examples on how to extend it to meet your requirements.

Most of the Chef development so far appears to have been focused on core features and most recently a simplified installer - hopefully reporting will become a focus as the product matures.