What Ansible really got that it sells is 1) It is new. Everyone likes a fresh new thing. 2) It suckers people in who just didn't know or wanted to care about configuration management. Tell them about Puppet and declarative syntax and their eyes start rolling. "But I just have 2 servers... I don't need declarative syntax". And, of course, they are doing configuration management, they just do it by hand, one step at a time, via SSH and shell scripting. Ansible comes in and says "we can make that a little better for you", at least that how I got to know it.

It is funny the Salt vs Ansible interplay. As people complained about each other, they implemented each others' feature in response. Salt got SSH mode and Ansible got fireball mode.