Yeah, I know many people who use and like vagrant but I've heard a too many people mention it as a major impediment when they were just getting starting. Sure, someone with a bit of sysadmin experience can usually get it working fairly quickly but I've seen entire meetups where 90% of the people used a Linux instance on EC2 rather than try to debug it.

Anything which makes that process easier for newcomers is welcome, particularly for non-specialists like front-end specialists, scientists, data-analysts and other technical professionals for whom figuring out a toolchain is a road-block to their job rather than the job itself.