How do you deploy?

How do you deploy new Linux builds? Linux admin for a number of years and I really like cobbler and puppet. I've tried using Satellite and Spacewalk for system management, but I find their interfaces clunky and non-intuitive. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong. What are your thoughts of Satellite vs. Puppet/Chef/etc. for system management. Yeah, I used to be one of those guys that did system management with "for i in $INPUT ; do ssh $i blah blah blah," but I'm trying to get away from that.

I've seen several posts about imaging. I'm not a fan of imaging for deployment in any way, but if you use imaging, what are the advantages over PXE & kickstart? I hate having to touch a system after it's been deployed, so I used to boot an ISO image, put all the network parameters on the command line and get a custom kickstart file. I didn't want to change the IP, move it to the right VLAN and all that post build stuff. One and done. What is the modern way of dealing with these issues? I live mostly in a VMware environment.

Thanks for the feedback.