It's pretty funny, but it's an example of where we do NOT want to be headed.
The Unix philosophy is a set of tenets based on assumptions that held in the 1970s and 1980s, but don't really hold today. One of these tenets is, "make the implementation as simple and as correct as possible; it is better for an implementation to be simple than to be correct."
This may have been true in an era when every site had to roll a homegrown solution for pert-near everything that didn't come with the base OS, but in this era of open source it is far more important for the implementation to be correct, because the Right Thing can be written once and everybody can use it, and save themselves the accumulated hours of frustration incurred by simple-but-subtly-incorrect implementations.
This is why the Linux world is standardizing on systemd -- to get AWAY from Fucking Shell Scripts and towards a more deterministic, declarative model of what we want done. In the case of configuration management, what you want is a tool that accepts a description of what the system configuration should be, diffs that against the current configuration, and enacts a plan of changes to get from point A to point B automatically. NixOS seems to be a good step in this overall direction.
Fun fact: I used to do instancing of robotic control computers running a specialized version of Debian with Fucking Shell Scripts (FAI, to be exact: http://fai-project.org/ ). It was pure hell. We would have killed for a more deterministic solution.