Speaking as someone relatively new to Python (coming from an embedded development background, mostly with C/C++): What's the standard way of distributing client

Speaking as someone relatively new to Python (coming from an embedded development background, mostly with C/C++): What's the standard way of distributing client-side programs/libraries? If you only have one script you can just put it in /usr/local/bin/ but otherwise you have to mess with the system site-packages or modify sys.path before importing, right? I've seen a surprisingly large number of distros that didn't check /usr/ and /usr/local/ for packages. Do you just hand the user an automatic virtualenv script? (Outside of using one of the binary builders out there, obviously.)