I agree 1000%! I honestly could not imagine using Jupyter without a virtual env. I don't worry about anything related to Python / virtual envs since I started using the Anaconda distribution. Further, every sciency tool is at my fingertips with almost ZERO configuration on my part...
If I had to vote on: "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." for Python dev, I would choose Conda so hard.
Instead, I recommend creating whatever environment you want, activating it, and then running python setup.py develop or pip install -e . so that your package is installed in develop mode in that environment.
If I had to vote on: "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." for Python dev, I would choose Conda so hard.