Have you looked at conda and http://anaconda.org? We spent a lot of time curating the most important Python packages for data science into the Anaconda distribution, and conda packages are a great format for distributing complicated software.
this is pretty cool and I think you are on the right track here. but here's the same question here - are you making the process of package creation much easier ?
Because I suspect until you acquire mindshare among the academics (who distribute their research as R code), this will be difficult to scale.
