This is great! I was thinking exactly along those lines, and started looking for puppet/chef scripts that are readily available.

It seems that using puppet has a pretty steep learning curve, at least from what I could gather skimming the docs.

Actually what I would really like to see is an interactive script, which then guides me through the process of hardening a fresh ubuntu server install, offering sane suggestions along the way.

I am pretty sure such scripts do exist, but having them maintained and regualarly updated somewhere would be quite neat.