Native support for things is irrelevant cause you can use modules from forge, and the community is the largest of all other CM tools around, so I hardly believe that you lack something there.
Actually, you can circumvent lack of looping with defined types and calling them with array. In my opinion if you need loops in your infrastructure code you're doing something wrong.
Saddest thing is that from all the people who brag about migrating away from puppet online nobody actually mentioned some of the drawbacks that are REAL and present - and not even discussed in Puppet community - like lack of simple search function vs complexity of exported resources... that means that people are moving away for reasons different then functionality alone...
Another real issue is the slowness of compile process, which happens on the master. But it's OK for "smaller" deployments - like if you don't go above 10-20k nodes.
So basically you don't have any valid technical points against puppet other then Salt seems easier for you to use. Which is ok.