Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that pip didn't handle multiple versions (though my comment certainly reads that way). I intended that to be a comparison of "full

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that pip didn't handle multiple versions (though my comment certainly reads that way). I intended that to be a comparison of "full-blown" package managers with conda. (As were the user-home-directory and cross-platform comments.) At any rate, pip is really fantastic, and I use it constantly. However, being able to handle non-python dependencies is huge in the scientific world, where lots of python packages have a _lot_ of non-python dependencies. Widely-used packages (e.g. numpy, matplotlib, scipy, etc) don't have very many, and are well supported, but a lot of the less widely-used packages can be a real pain to build. I'm excited about it because conda has the potential to replace a couple of virtual machines I currently keep around for this purpose. I'll certainly admit it's not a majority use-case, but if it works as advertised it will be very useful for me, at any rate.