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If you read closer, it only scans directories added by .pth files, not all 
directories on sys.path.  This is to facilitate better encapsulation, so an 
admin user can create a .pth file that says "~/lib/python2.4/site-
packages" and any user that starts Python will have their own site-
packages dir, where .pth files work, without resorting to PYTHONPATH.  
This way you can use distutils to install packages into your homedir, 
and they will actually work as expected.

PYTHONPATH is utterly disastrous if you regularly deal with several 
different Python interpreters.