we have been slowly moving off Symantec/Altiris client/server mgmt which is a good agent based solution but whose usability for GUI or reporting customization I found seriously lacking.
in evaluating the new SAM6.0MG release (I appreciate a good marketing term now and again) I see the last few pieces that Altiris did for us that we had hoped to not have to recreate in powershell- namely installed software and firmware. I think software usage numbers are still missing but we don't really use that metric yet.
So after sam6.0 I'll rely on pull and if I need push I'll use powershell, scheduled scripts, syslog, and or logs.