So there's quite obviously not a lot of interest in this. I will simply write my own little package in that case. I guess after the weekend I'll close the issue on github unless anyone wants to keep it open.

@Jaime: I've read up on ufuncs and they definitely seem like the way to go. Can you say a bit more on how you generated scipy/spatial/src/umath_distance.c.src? I assume it was generated and not written by hand, so did you do that with Cython or something else not included in the pull request?