[yen223]

(Would also be nice if building ipython on OS X was easier!)

What issue do you face? Genuinely curious, because I use Mountain Lion, and installing IPython for me simply involves doing

    pip install ipython

I installed Python from source though.

[nimrody]

Thanks. It mostly worked. Of course, the real benefit of ipython is the notebook. For that you need (on OS X)

    brew install python   # or just download and install from source
    pip install numpy
    pip install matplotlib
    pip install ipython[zmq,qtconsole,notebook,test]

Actually, for qtconsole you need to install Qt and pip install pyside

But the latter failed to build on my machine... (Given that Apple's gcc version is ancient and clang is the default compiler on OS X -- it's a wonder the other tools were built correctly)