With this in mind, it's easy to see that the Dropbox made the right design decision. With symlinks, the problem was already solved for them in a way that power users are already familiar with.
Then when you setup a new machine - install dropbox and let it sync, then just symlink them back up... everything is back to normal.
Really a nice setup so you can continue to change your config files and not worry about saving the changes to some backup gist or something
You get the simple, instant user model (dropbox folder), which you can customize to any arbitrary user model, as much or as little as you want, when you want it. And simple syncing.
If you're a Windows user think of a more hardcode version of shortcuts. You can create them in Windows Vista / 7 from the command line through the `mklink` command.
Basically you can set up a symbolic link from inside your Dropbox folder to any other directory and Dropbox will start syncing the folder without you having to actually copy or move files.