Everyone can go and waste their time in whichever way they like.
Some people like gardening, although they will never get to "sell produce" at the vegetables market. That doesn't mean gardening is bad, it just means they enjoy it and enjoy wasting their time doing gardening. Other people just go and buy vegetables at the supermarket that were grown at commercial farming.
Same with doing configuration management on your laptop, if you really want to enjoy it, go for it. For most people its a complete waste of time and a useless activity compared to the alternative, which is changing the few files you need changing by hand, and backing it up to solve the "lost my work" problem.
I get what you're saying and agree when it comes to setting up a machine, in that the end result will be basically the same.
For gardening though I can garantee you that homegrown fruits and vegetables can be far superior to anything you can find at the supermarket, so would argue the end result is not the same.
Maybe a better example would be using hand tools versus power tools -- if one takes the expense of power tools out of the equation.
