Sure, multi-tier has been a focus from day 1, so a common example is a workflow where you want to hop between tiers of a 3-tier application, touch load balancer

Sure, multi-tier has been a focus from day 1, so a common example is a workflow where you want to hop between tiers of a 3-tier application, touch load balancers and monitoring along the way, and so on... that's all trivially possible primarily because it's push, not pull, based. Ansible can both code up and execute those kinds of workflows very quickly. A major core other aspect is not requiring any agents on the remote nodes, not even having a server, and not needing an additional PKI. Because it's using SSH, it's using your OS credentials, so if your boxes are, for example, using Kerberized SSH, that just works out of the box. The resource model is still very puppet-like (state=absent/present, idempotence, etc), in that we have states and convergence, but I have tried in many places to not make this a programming language, and keep the amount of syntax down. A key focus was making the content readable, so you didn't have to think about dependency ordering and could tell by skimming the playbooks top to bottom exactly what they will do.