Hi David,
I have to say I'm a bit sceptic about adding more runtimes to one distribution [1]. This will increase the maintenance burden and the general packaging complexity with no real benefit to me.
Personally I (as a developer) find it easy enough to support Python 2.4-2.6 in one software (and Python 2.3 is usually doable if really necessary). Therefore I don't feel the need to use a more recent version of Python e.g. for RHEL5.
To me the point of a distribution is to provide a selected set of software which works well together. If we ship other stacks, IMHO the point should be to just ship the interpreter, maybe setuptools but not all the modules. Speaking as a Python developer, the biggest pain is to compile Python itself. All the other stuff I can do with virtualenv.
So the question to me is: Is all the infrastructure work worth it? To me the answer is no but on on the other hand I'm just a single, not very active packager.
fs
[1] I see Python 2/3 as different languages that live side-by-side which is why I welcome the additional Python 3 stack wholeheartedly.