[Hontano]

"The job of an OS not a human admin. "apt-get install puppet" on the clients and "apt-get install puppetmaster" on the puppetmaster. That's about it."

It might be a simple apt-get command, but consider setting up Chef Server. You're suddenly adding the following to your system: Ruby, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, Java, merb-assets, merb-core, merb-helpers, merb-param-protection, merb-slices, thin, solr-jetty. And then maybe libxml-ruby, merb-haml, haml, coderay. (From http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installing+Chef+Server)

That's a whole heap of stuff and moving parts I wasn't looking for. Compare that to the above mentioned Ansible or cdist on the lightweight end of the spectrum.