I set it up twice (once at the meetup), and it was not a big deal, but only because I had had prior experience in setting up clojure environments.

A single emacs function to update/start clojure seems a good way to go, however I had it in the past and as soon as the dependencies broke I had to go in and figure out what was going on under the hood and how to fix it. Which is educational but distracting. Will your setup still work in 12 months?

Thanks for all the effort in bringing Clojure to the masses! :-)

P.S. Got an error -- will submit a bug report. EDIT: wrote a blog comment instead.