"Too often when coming to a new language, it's hard to know what is old and busted and what the future is."

This is too true. As a Python/Django newcomer that has been difficult.

Any perspectives on buildout and where it fits into the toolbox of the future?

I started using it after watching Jacob Kaplan-Moss' Django Deployment Workshop ([1] -- highly recommended) and I like it, but I read about virtualenv and pip much more often.

[1] http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/1689/pycon-2010-django...

One thing I don't really get about Python deployment tools in general is the idea of building eggs for everything, especially the parts of my own applications that I will never redistribute. This seems to be emphasized with all the tools.