Comment by jayofdoom

I always tell people this:

With Red Hat, Anaconda is the installer. With Ubuntu, ubiquity.

etc ...

With Gentoo -- YOU are the installer. This means you have to be ready to perform -- more or less manually -- many of the tasks automated in other distributions. I sorta see this as the same as a tutorial level in a video game: you learn how to read and follow the wiki which is essentially the key to success in Gentoo.