We have a comparison against Chef and Puppet, which may be relevant to Salt here: http://www.serfdom.io/intro/vs-chef-puppet.html. Not sure about Salt's search, but Serf is designed to run much more often than config management tools, and is able to handle topology changes in seconds instead of minutes or hours. Serf is also designed ground up to be fault tolerant, which is not usually a design goal of config management tools.
