Bit surprised to see this advertised as 3 hours (how long can it take to dump HTML into a gh_pages branch & push?). After reading, I see that there's a huge overhead in setup and configuration. The complexity seems way out of line with the result!
Looks like it's all mainly to do with the static site generation though. You can certainly still dump some handmade html into a gh-pages branch and have a (non-generated) static site in less than ten minutes.