This section is, by definition, incomplete. Feel free to send in details of your favourite distribution.
Red Hat has a GUI printer administration tool (in the control panel)
which can add remote printers and printers on local devices. It lets
you choose a ghostscript-supported printer type and Unix device file
to print to, then installs a print queue in /etc/printcap and
writes a short PostScript-and-ascii magic filter based around gs
and
nenscript.
This solution works fairly well, and is trivial to setup for common
cases.
Please send me info on what other distributions do!