I am a longtime cvs user, and also recently set up a subversion server to manage all my personal projects. A couple of comments:

Why don't you just save your password in a .cvspass file? Then you'll never have to enter it.

Once you get into branching, I don't think subversion is "almost indistinguishable" from cvs. In fact, I think it's quite different, and somewhat less intuitive.

My experience setting up subversion (on OS X) was similarly complex. I've set up cvs servers before, and it takes much less time and is virtually foolproof. When I set up the subversion server, I initially used a berkeley DB datastore, as that's the default. I very quickly ran into problems with checksums and all kinds of weird transaction errors. And this was only after importing a small project and trying to check it out on a different machine.

After doing some reading, I've been able to make subversion much more stable by dropping my old repository and creating one using an fsfs datastore, which seems much less brittle.

So far, I'm not wowed, and I still find CVS more intuitive, but maybe that's just because I'm used to it. We'll see how it goes. Here's a post of mine about importing projects, which I also found somewhat less intuitive than in cvs: