Fedora 19 still ships pip 1.3.1. Fedora 20 ships pip 1.4.1. Fedora 21 will probably ship 1.5.2 (although that hasn't actually happened yet, so Rawhide still has 1.4.1). The relative alignment of the release cycles is such that the pip version system Python will always be about 6 months behind upstream. At the moment, this doesn't really matter, because people can just upgrade pip in their virtual environment(s) instead. And the way of handling that is completely consistent cross-distro, cross-platform and cross-version. It's a higher level of isolation than that offered by *not* installing pip into the virtual environments - the two approaches are *not* equivalent, and one is *not* clearly superior to the other, but rather there are pros and cons to both. Cheers, Nick.