If you're looking at a distro that doesn't take hours upon hours to install, and is easily updatable check out Arch.

much like emerge it offers pacman, to install any package you just type in pacman -S packagename, and to update your entire system you just type pacman -Syu

IIRC arch is much easier to install than gentoo and takes about 1/20th of the time to get fully up and running. The installation howto is here http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Quick%20Archlinux%20Install and the only thing I can think of that it's missing is when you edit rc.conf add your networking card module to the MODULES=() line