1. I don't know how to pronounce it. I usually try to say "puff-pet" and look like an idiot while doing so.
2. I started learning Vagrant/Puppet a few months ago. Puppet is powerful, but has "gotchas" that felt like I was continuously bashing my head against the wall. I didn't want other people to go through the same frustration, so I decided to add buttons. Developers love buttons!
3. Some of the goals of PuPHPet are to
a) make tools like (X|W|M)AMP obsolete,
b) show developers the benefits of VM development (especially PHP developers),
and c) provide quickstart setups for popular projects (https://puphpet.com/quickstart/symfony , https://puphpet.com/quickstart/puphpet).
Possibly even d) setup an API to allow people to POST their config requirements and get back a link to a generated zip file, without needing to use the GUI itself. I could use some help on that front: https://github.com/puphpet/puphpet/issues/100