Is there a good step-by-step on a setup like this? I've used RVM for Ruby and that is pretty straight forward...

Someone commenting on their workflow using these tools would be awesome as well.

I've been bitten by this a few times as pypi was down. I still do this, but I'm thinking about setting up some private hosting for the libs I need.

"Private hosting" in this case, can be as simple as a plain-jane Apache server with some tarballs in a directory with listing turned on. Use -f to point pip to the directory. Instant private hosting. This is more or less how we publish internal libraries at work.

you don't need pypi to use pip.

Rvm does well for ruby

And of course some asshat downvotes because you bring up ruby...

I'll just point out that rvm isn't a pip for ruby. It only manages what version of ruby you're currently using and allows seamless switching. It comes in handy with ruby because of all the compatibility issues between ruby versions and rails versions. Pip is a sophisticated package manager that can be used with virtualenv to isolate where Python libraries are installed. They are indeed both good tools for development but serve different purposes.

RVM also manages gemsets, which lets you quickly save and switch the set of installed gems (packages). You're correct that it doesn't replace gem as a package manager.