I share your opinion on vagrant, but it still stands that there are lots of tools you use on your host machine that you might want to make simple to share and configure organizationally. Look into how pivotal labs (consultancy) works and its a little mind-blowing and inspiring -- they all share the same configs and many of the same defaults and dotfiles and shortcuts (which they decide through deliberation and consensus), they reformat their macbooks from scratch between each project (for infosec), and they all know how to write chef recipes, so if they customize their system in a way that they want back after they wipe, then they write a recipe for it and share it back via pivotal_workstation :)

It's pretty cool. And even if not everyone can put the time into building that sort of solution from scratch, pretty much everyone can ride their coattails