I would rather not get into "X is better than Y", but this is not quite accurate.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I see a distilled Puppet syntax there, where Ansible (http://ansible.cc) is more about modeling both resource states and ordered processes across machines.
Ansible actually uses SSH by default but there's a 0mq accelerator if you want to use it. We don't just execute individual SSH commands, modules are remote resources that model idempotent state -- but don't stay resident. The 0mq accelerator came later. There's also a pull mode, and a local mode in Ansible. Using SSH is nice because you don't have the additional PKI, and all that comes with having to maintain that. (No needs of accurate NTP and DNS either, and working with Kerberized SSH and using your OS credentials is possible). Need to do non-root things? You can do things (if you have permissions) entirely as non-root.
Furthermore, Ansible does not have a dedicated daemon on the client. It's daemonless, and consumes no resources when not running. When running with 0mq, the daemon is ephemeral, stopping after a set period of time, to not consume resources.
It also requires no bootstrapping, so if you have blank cloud images with nothing on them, or brownfield systems in the field, you can just start managing them immediately. cloud-init and so on are great for this, all cloud tools can inject keys. For this reason (no agents), it's starting to look very appealing on embedded devices and network hardware as well.
While implemented in Python you can write modules in any language. Finally, Ansible's core focus is around making multi-tier orchestration easy (somewhat of a niche case), so that leads it to look a lot different at the language/resource level. But if you have just one tier, you can use it too.
It's frequently used to deal with rolling updates involving N-tier applications with monitoring servers and load balancers all in play, though you can definitely use Ansible just for classical config management.
I think part of the reason Salt may look similar to Ansible is Salt is clearly inspired by Func, especially the minion/overlord terminology, globbing, minion-to-minion, etc, and I was one of the original authors of Func at Red Hat. We were toying around with a message bus Func at the time and decided not to do it.
So, yeah, lots of tools in this space.
In Ruby config land, there's also Sprinkle, Rexify, etc! So many options!