Even on Macs, you can use MacPorts. They provide a lot of versions pre-compiled (and everything is BSD-solid).
Macports and homebrew Pythons are dependencies of other packages. They can be used by you, but they are not meant for you.
This means at some point, they will contain a surprise, and not a good one.
Sample of one, but I never encountered anything even broken in MacPorts. They seem to embrace the BSD ethos of doing everything right (even if at a slower pace, as some packages lag a few releases behind Homebrew).