It can suck. I used to be able to run servers with no problem a few months ago. Now it's become harder for some reason, and I only seem to manage to make it work from one of my computers and I can't explain why (which is something that makes me really angry). I used to use Hamachi too, to circumvent port forwarding and whatnot. And now I'm having trouble even with Hamachi.
At some point I managed to make it work with the default Minecraft server (no bukkit), but somehow the game started to become really choppy super fast (yes, I'm running it on the same computer I'm playing it, and it should work fine because I used to do it perfectly well with a much suckier computer).
So yeah. It's still not very user-friendly to tech and network noobs, and I think that's still one of the failings of this game. It works eventually. But every time I decide to run a server after months of not playing, it seems I have to figure out something because of a new problem and whatnot.