The way people typically do this is by VCing their configurations in a "dotfiles" repository. New machine? Pull your dotfiles, and create the symlinks in your homedir.
I currently do this with my entire .emacs.d directory, but it sounds like Derbasti only pulls his .emacs, and then has code to check for installed packages and get any that are missing.
Then everytime you installed a package it would get written into the list and everytime you moved your init it would all happen automatically.
That would be cool. And not hard to do either. You could just keep a customization variable of the "base packages" or something and have it saved by the standard custom stuff.