boto is great and I am a big fan of it. I think the combination of troposphere and boto is very powerful. Using boto along can certainly get the job done, but: - it will take longer to come up as calls will happen in serial (CloudFormation does parallel execution) - you will have to do your own dependency management (not hard, just get the order right) - you will have to do your own teardown when you are finished with the resources (this is why I would use both)

Hope that helps.