Right now, I use Upstart (and thus Ubuntu) because it can--kinda-sorta--do the same "supervision-tree" thing that Erlang/OTP does; you can have a virtual "service" that runs a script on startup to get a list of tokens, then starts a set of dynamic children using those tokens ("initctl start myservice/worker FOR=bob", that kind of thing), monitors them, and restarts them when they crash; bringing down the supervisor cleanly shuts down its currently-running dynamic children, and so on.

Can systemd do that? I like everything else I've heard about it, but I haven't seen any documentation regarding this sort of usage.