At least with linux there's ways where you could fix that. I personally probably wouldn't as it's a hassle and my home folder is on a separate partition anyways

At least with linux there's ways where you could fix that. I personally probably wouldn't as it's a hassle and my home folder is on a separate partition anyways, so a clean install doesn't lose me much. For those interested in the how anyway: You'd boot into a liveCD, Chroot into the installs root folder, and apt-get python2.7. If removing python breaks apt there's probably some flag to apt-get to get it to poke at a not-root folder you could use. Worst case you copy the python install from the liveCD, reboot, and then fix python from the booted system using a now-working apt.