Well, cookiecutter came first, has a huge library of supported templates, and works across multiple languages.
Any reason why tox isn't included? I find it a lot easier to run tests, especially with different python versions.
This seems like a good place to get inspiration from, or quickly look up file formats and conventions - but actually using it? That would be an overkill.
(This template, alone, is 1000 lines long, counted with wc -l. The last Python project I released was 500 lines long, including setup.py and README.)
I love Python for its simplicity. This doesn't feel simple.
Thinking of unit tests and sphinx from the start is a good idea. But vagrant does seem like overkill for most things given virtualenvs, and that setup.py makes me sad.
Tossing here one that helps building tagged releases: