I want to like this but having to use a template syestem to build a yaml file seems entirely backwards to me.

Ref: http://salt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/tutorials/state...

Templating is definitely not required - states are run through Jinja by default, but for most simple setups you won't need to template anything.

As far as I can tell, templating is an addon - you can specify everything as pure yaml, also.

After using Puppet and Chef for small production deployments and local vagrant setups, salt looks promising in terms of performance and transparency.