The job of an OS not a human admin. "apt-get install puppet" on the clients and "apt-get install puppetmaster" on the puppetmaster. That's about it.
"Puppet was mind-bogglingly slow"
Was it a pause exactly equal to one DNS lookup timeout? The SSL inside puppet used to get all wound up about reverse DNS matching the forward or whatever exactly. You need working DNS to puppet. If DNS is dead you may as well forget debugging puppet until your local DNS is healthy.
Also its possible to do unusual SSL configurations that can make it a bit slow. Vanilla out of the box should be reasonably fast. Starving a virtual image of CPU can make the SSL slow... a virtual 40 MHZ 386 equivalent is not going to do SSL any faster than a physical 40 MHZ 386 used to.