Not sure if this helps any, but running it from a Maya terminal (/Applications/Autodesk/maya2011/Maya\ Terminal.term) under OS X gives:
michiel$ mayapy -c "import maya.standalone; maya.standalone.initialize(); raise Exception" Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 1, in <module> Exception -- Michiel -- http://groups.google.com/group/python_inside_maya
