This would still be a massive improvement over the status quo, which in this situation would present a perfect simulacrum of downloading and installing the package you asked for, except then when you start python the import still fails.
I did think of another issue: when installing into a virtualenv, we probably want to keep the current system, so explicit/path/bin/pip continues to work as expected.
Unfortunately by the time you know to run this command to have already understood the problem and how to fix it :-). That said, this is probably cheap enough we could do it automatically at startup. Does pip know whether it's pip, pip3, etc. that invoked it? I guess sys.argv[0] should tell us?
Sigh.
-n