I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
And even if the program doesn’t use config files (like various gnome, xfce and other programs), it should be possible to programmatically export and import full or partial configurations.