I like the way you think pbreit, I would not bother except that we have something up now (which does work actually) that is really confusing for new pip and/or Web2py users and even a few more seasoned ones ; ) .
The ideas in the draft basically bypass the whole "packaging" concept and does a straight up mercurial clone of Web2py as you mentioned cause it works really well and people know exactly whats going on. The current pip package places gluon and other files in the Python site-packages directory and installs a couple of utilities in the Python/bin directory which when run creates the familiar Web2py "applications" directory in the directory it is run from but it is not "attached" to the Web2py directory so it can be very disorienting for those less familiar. I am thinking we can adjust the current pip package so that is does a "standard looking" install by default that also does the other stuff it does now. So the package creator still has the same functionality and the less familiar have a standard setup... C.
