Default configuration template for all subsites

I finally got my multisite configuration up and running today, but I suddenly find myself in a very tiresome situation where for every site, I have to manually configure settings for the system, widgets, themes, and plugins.
Among these, plugin setting is the most painful. I am using about 30 plugins, so it means I have at least 100 options to configure for each subsite and I have 4 subsites to run!

My point is, if multisite is designed to save people trouble by not configuring multiple WP installation, I hope this would be something that’s on the WP blueprint. It’s best to allow a set of default (or template) configuration that is assigned to all sites when they are created, so that user only need to do minor changes to adapt to the situation in different sub-sites, right?
Now, there is already a ‘Network Update’ feature available that allows all the network sites to update their plugins at once. Why can’t we have something similar for the plugins?

Regards,
Angela