Python's not awesome packaging back in the easy_install days really put me off of using django as much as I could have. I liked python a lot, but I ended up in ruby more because gems were a much nicer way to go and bundler made it nice. Good to see python catching up a bit in that regard, but I enjoy ruby and Sinatra too much to switch back at this point.
Package discovery was annoying. With Ruby, gems, and bundler I can define my project gems and install them with 'bundle install'. Any machine I move to it does that. It's fantastic.
With node and npm you can do more or less the same thing.
Maybe with easy_install you can now, but I remember having to manually download packages and easy_install them. No package management, no easy discovery, no project dependency management.
