This is a pretty reductionist explanation, and it misses a lot of the benefits of state management. You make it sound like you just write a bunch of lines of shell script and you can sub in some variables, which is not at all their major strength.

The benefit of Salt, which it has over Ansible, is that it doesn't have to use SSH (which, as mentioned in the article, doesn't scale well to large deploys), and it can do a great deal more things than just 'run shell scripts from a file'.

If someone were to read only your comment they wouldn't see the benefit of these systems at all, which is unfortunate.

Ansible with Fireball wouldn't use SSH but rather 0mq.