Not really. It simply means that mechanisms need to be built that enable settings changes in a OS supplied fashion. Solaris has come a long way in this with SMF

Not really. It simply means that mechanisms need to be built that enable settings changes in a OS supplied fashion. Solaris has come a long way in this with SMF's configuration utilities svccfg and svcprop. From a configuration management perspective this approach is dramatically better than scripts that try to edit text files.