I love Make for my small projects. It still could be better. Here is my list:

* Colorize errors

* Hide output unless the command fails

* Automatic help command which shows (non-file) targets

* Automatic clean command which deletes all intermediate files

* Hash-based update detection instead of mtime

* Changes in "Makefile" trigger rebuilds

* Parallel builds by default

* Handling multi-file outputs

* Continuous mode which watches the file system for changes and rebuilds automatically

I know of no build system which provides these features and is still simple and generic. Tup is close, but it fails with LaTeX, because of the circular dependencies (generates and reads aux file).