Closely related are the current discussions regarding the apparently circular instructions for getting pip and virtualenv installed onto a system (where the recommended solution for getting pip is to use a virtualenv created virtual environment, which always includes pip, while the recommended solution for getting virtualenv is to install it using pip).
You can break the cycle with get-pip.py, but that gets you into the situation where you're in direct conflict with the system package manager on Linux, so its a poor solution to recommend to beginners (while using pip to install into the system site-packages on Linux can be useful if you know what you're doing, it can also get your system into a bad state if you make a mistake).