Hey abillybob,
We've been running Ubuntu in some of our labs, our cyber school and soon our 1:1 machines, and it's been great. I think a lot of it comes down to what all you need these devices to do. If you need to use a directory, then it does require a bit of work. In our case, the kids are encouraged to use their cloud storage to save their files which eliminates the need to mount shares.
On the management end, Puppet works well and I'd also recommend looking into Ansible. It's a clientless management tool that utilizes SSH to push commands.
Like the others guys mentioned, starting small is a great idea.
