Because IPSec is a dog in a million different ways (config, firewall, etc) and lots of shops moved to PPTP because it shipped on their Windows servers and is br

Because IPSec is a dog in a million different ways (config, firewall, etc) and lots of shops moved to PPTP because it shipped on their Windows servers and is brain-dead simple to implement and use. It was "good enough." A lot of those issues linked are MS specific anyway, regarding MS-CHAP. You don't have to use MS-CHAP. PPTP has fallen out of fashion now, and I'm a little surprised to see it being promoted. Now we're all moving to IPSec running in L2TP which seems to be the best of both worlds. You lose the various firewall issues plain jane IPSec introduces and get IPSec level security. Of course you still have an IPSec config on your hands, but that's a one time pain. OSX, Windows, and Android support it natively which is a big plus as well. If you just want something quick and dirty, PPTP or OpenVPN SSL VPN are the obvious choices. Personally, I'd rather just do SOCKS or port forwarding with an ssh server somewhere than do lazy VPN. Its worth getting right.