I use an approach similar to this [1] to automatically install missing packages on startup. This means that when I move to a new machine I just have to clone the repo with my emacs configuration to have everything ready, settings _and_ extra packages.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10092322/how-to-automatic...
It helped me a great deal, and since then I never looked back.
Hope we can convert you to the church of emacs :P
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxj9UAX4Em-IiOfvF2Qs7...