I think that
$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
is a bad idea.
You should not mix multiple packaging system on your operating system.
And more you can dammage it pip provide more recent package than your distro. And if you upgrade a lib that have an incompatibility with a part of the system, you can corrupt it. I have no example to give but I am sure you can find it... Ubuntu now have many tools written in python.
You should use pip inside a virtualenv only.
And, fortunatelly when you create a virtualenv, pip is installed in it, and you don't need to use the --distribute to have it.
What I tell people is that Python (as installed by apt-get, yum) is not on your system for you to develop with. It is there because some of the system tools are written in Python, including at least part of the apt packaging system. It's also there for System admins to use for writing Python scripts instead of bash scripts.
But for app development, get your own Python, manage it yourself and install 'distribute' so that you have both easy_install and pip to work with. I've taken that to extreme by making a portable Python distro that comes in a tarball and runs on any Linux distro, but even if you only untar the source and run ./configure --prefix=/home/python;make
That will build a default Python with support for any shared libraries for which you have a development version installed ( -dev version on debian/ubuntu, -devel version on redhat/suse)
sudo make install will install it, assuming that you have write permissions on the target prefix that you specified. You can even hide it in your home directory with --prefix=~/tools/python272
You should not mix multiple packaging system on your operating system. And more you can dammage it pip provide more recent package than your distro. And if you upgrade a lib that have an incompatibility with a part of the system, you can corrupt it. I have no example to give but I am sure you can find it... Ubuntu now have many tools written in python.
You should use pip inside a virtualenv only. And, fortunatelly when you create a virtualenv, pip is installed in it, and you don't need to use the --distribute to have it.