I would either use the split poly tool to create it and then split some more to get the mesh all quads as if you then smooth it will come out nice and round, or extrude the face tool depending on the geometry of the surface. May be a longer way round but your mesh will be all the better for it, and so will your modeling skills.

The main problems with boolians is that they give really unpredictable meshes with ngons, tris, non manifold geo, odd verticies, that if you then smooth or convert to sub'd's become very messey, in modeling your best off to try and keep to all quads (although sometimes the odd tri or n gon isnt too bad). Thats why I pretty much never use them. You can use them but you really need to match the operation to the mesh so that you know what your going to get.