The most common complaints about Make I see are that it uses real tabs and that the syntax is a little cryptic. Neither of these hold any water though, so I continue to use it.

For a longer list of plusses and minuses, a quick googling turned this up.

Nice thing about Makefiles is that they act as managers of your other scripts that do the real work. And, of course, it's general, so you can use Makefiles for anything that involves steps that depend on eachother in a specific order.