Nope.  I totally get that they don’t know what a shell or command prompt is.  THEY. NEED. TO. LEARN.  Hiding it is not a good idea for anyone.

I actually take this approach myself in my classes. However, I also have as prerequisites for my classes:

Some Experience in some programming language

And

Basic familiarity with the command line.

I then let them use whatever dev. Environment they want, while supporting and recommending a good editor and the command line.

However, If people want to learn python that don’t have those prerequisites, then we suggest a different class designed for total newbies.

In THAT class,  we use a more proscribed dev environment so that everyone is doing the same thing in the same way. It was IDLE, and has lately been PyCharm.

And the intro to data analytics class uses Anaconda and the Jupyter notebook.

My point?

We're not in the business of making judgements about who should and shouldn't become Python programmers - we're in the business of making sure that Python is accessible to as many people as possible by removing irrelevant barriers to adoption,

Sure, but who is “we”? I think “we” is the python community, not the cPython developers.

So providing an environment that makes it easy and obvious to install packages is a great idea, but I think it’s the job of IDEs and other higher level tools, not the REPL.

If we need to add a feature to Python itself to make it easier for IDEs and the like to implement dynamic package adding, then by all means, let’s do it.

Final note:

I DO see a lot of questions ( on mailing lists, etc) from folks that try to type “pip install something” at the python command line.