I am completely surprised no one has linked to technomancy's emacs-start-kit: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

Clone that as your emacs.d, add a .el file named the same as your logged in user, and add your specific preferences there. (I like to have it include stuff in a jmhodges directory in emacs.d, of course.)

On that note, my own fork of it with very minor personal changes: https://github.com/jmhodges/emacs-starter-kit