At the beginning of your story you mentioned the GUI client - that is the missing piece ;).  I've been saying for years that we need a Python.app that lets you easily bootstrap all this stuff: walk you through installing C dev tools if your packages need them, present a GUI search interface to finding packages, present a normal "file->open" dialog for selecting a location for a new virtualenv, automatically pop open a terminal, launching a Jupyter notebook whose kernel is pointed at said environment...