The big selling point of `soanm` is that you don't need to have anything extra installed on a typical distribution (not even ssh!) and you don't need to know any extra configuration language, or how to use a special library, or anything beyond shell scripting. Of course, you also trade a lot of functionality away: The programs you write aren't declarative, and so on. But personally I don't care about that when provisioning a new dev machine. I'd much rather just run some quick scripts.
Ansible only needs Python to be installed on the host (and SSH access), I don’t think it’s an unreasonable requirement.