This is a nice post, and the Python packaging community is making strides in the right direction.

However, it's not there yet. Armin could bring himself to say this in this post: "It's there, it kinda works, and it's probably worth your time."

Conda is not perfect (it needs more people building conda binaries as well as a few pull requests to add https improvements) --- but I will confidently say "it is there, it does work now, and it is worth your time"

This is especially true with a package repository like exists at http://repo.continuum.io and the many personal repositories at http://binstar.org.

People that have used conda for deployment (especially of complex C-dependencies in the NumPy and PyData stack) are saving time and effort today.