Oh, and application installation is (should be) completely different. On Windows, applications should probably be bundled with their own Python interpreter, a la py2exe. On Unix/Linux, I don't know what the standard is, so I'd have to defer to others.
This I disagree with. I think it's an overall bad thing to have all kinds of applications ship their own copy of Python; see also Aza Raskin's PyCon keynote.
Is this on Windows? It's fairly common practice.
Unfortunately so, yes. This can be viewed a burden to the adoption of Python: for a small application, you get this huge download to bundle.
Can you give me a pointer to Aza Raskin's keynote? Is it online anywhere? I'd be interested in his point of view.
Unfortunately no. I was looking for it, but couldn't find it. He mentioned a website with a "call for action", but I couldn't find that, either :-( Regards, Martin