story
These days, most productions environments are effectively isolated containers. If your production environment is a container, you probably should develop in a container as well. In that case you don't need much tooling for isolating an application's dependencies from other applications.
The tooling that you need is to build a python application, which means (1) get the dependencies (2) copy over some source code (or invoke the C-compiler if build a C<->Python extension) (3) run tests. Python's builtin setuptools does that fine. It didn't strike me as amazingly simple, but it's not amazingly complex either. pip is essentially a convenience wrapper for setuptools, i.e. pip is to setuptools as apt is to dpkg.
Basically, I believe that because of docker isolation is a irrelevant criterion by which to judge a language/ecosystem.
