Ned, I agree with you in principle, and would have preferred that this had been handled by PPA/distutils/PIP folk.  But see at least the first 4 messages on the original issue #23551, Feb 28 2015, where Donald Stufft says he would like to see it happen but would not do it.

Hightlights of the rest: In the first month of discussion others said yes, great idea.  6 months later, in September, I posted some proof of concept results. About 5 months later, I suggested on core-mentorship that this would be a good GSOC project and a few days later Upendra expressed interest.  Another student joined the competition in March.

March 27,  I posted on pydev "Adding a Pip GUI to IDLE and idlelib (GSOC project)"
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-March/143586.html
and said at the top "Before I commit to mentoring a student (sometime in April), I would like to be sure, by addressing any objections now, that I will be able to commit the code when ready (August or before)."
I ended the post with two possible objections.

As it turns out, no one objected.  Ethan Furman and Nick Coughlin strongly approved, the latter at
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-April/143611.html