That was my first thought as well. And then I started wondering why they are automating so much setup on OS X itself instead of using something like Vagrant for

That was my first thought as well. And then I started wondering why they are automating so much setup on OS X itself instead of using something like Vagrant for dev stuff. I find OS X to be pretty frustrating to work with natively. I've long tried to keep things like Postgres and Python consistent, but even a 10.x.y update can break things. Even with homebrew and postgresapp, it's challenging to keep the system from breaking. I'm currently running 10.7 precisely because I didn't want to rebuild my setup on 10.8 (I've since started using Vagrant much more aggressively to help solve this). I realize that part of the point of boxen is to help set a baseline but it seems like a Vagrant box that mimics the actual Github stack would make more sense.