Actually, building rpm/deb is quite easy, setuptools handles bdist_rpm by itself, for bdist_deb there is a plugin. For windows folks, bdist_msi is by default part of setuptools[1]. As a backup plan, you can still build eggs with bdist_egg and let pip handle the package manager duties for you.
The real complexity comes elsewhere - both in java and python world, setting up the java application server or wsgi server for python is more involved than just dropping an app there. And then there comes the debugging the exceptions... there I would pretty much prefer the python world.
Also, be careful with zipping python projects. While .zip is a valid member of pythonpath, packages can have problems with finding their assets (if they have any). For example, you cannot zip django this way.
[1] It even handles setting up vcvars when building native extensions. I was impressed, it was easiest building of windows binaries for free software I've ever seen.
Except that bsdist_rpm only builds the current package. That's not really any different than pip. You'd need to recursively build packages for all of the dependencies and have some magic to autodetect the provides/requires inside your little package ecosystem to be reasonable for any non-trival app to be deployable via rpm. This isn't impossible, but it's a far cry from PEX or uberjar.
The real complexity comes elsewhere - both in java and python world, setting up the java application server or wsgi server for python is more involved than just dropping an app there. And then there comes the debugging the exceptions... there I would pretty much prefer the python world.
Also, be careful with zipping python projects. While .zip is a valid member of pythonpath, packages can have problems with finding their assets (if they have any). For example, you cannot zip django this way.
[1] It even handles setting up vcvars when building native extensions. I was impressed, it was easiest building of windows binaries for free software I've ever seen.