Puppet and Chef do a lot more than install packages, which is literally all that Chocolatey does and most of what Boxstarter does. For example, how would you set a particular value in a configuration file with Chocolatey/Boxstarter? How would you add a system user? How would you make changes to the firewall settings? You can't, that's why Puppet and Chef look more complicated.

Powershell.

Not to mention that a lot of stuff you would do with Chef/Puppet, on Windows are done directly from the "package" itself (create a default user with limited rights to run under, set up IIS for web apps etc etc). And when something fails....isn't it better to debug your code rather than a black box ?

Actually you're right about Microsoft's solution... PowerShell.

But the technology is called Desired State Configuration which is PowerShell based.