This approach, bundling the necessary dependencies to install setuptools, seems like exactly the right thing to do, assuming that ensurepip should install setuptools at all, and I don't want to challenge that assumption here.

Looking at the patch and ensurepip, I wonder if the patch is necessary at all. It looks to me like the `find_links` declaration should be sufficient to allow a `pip install setuptools` to succeed and install its dependencies as long as they're bundled. @cstratak, can you test a less aggressive approach that merely bumps the dependency on setuptools and bundles the dependencies?