now this is a pointless feature.
time to get familiar with https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv
The fact that there is a super-specialized tool to do this demonstrates that it's not a pointless feature. It's much nicer to be able to use macports to install all the versions of python that I need instead of using brew to install pyenv and then pyenv to install python (and then pip to install python packages...)
The un-suffixed version ("python") refers to a default that can be switched with a single command affecting all related tools. It's great.
This is not python specific either, it also works with perl, ruby, etc