I've been using the Anaconda python package from continuum.io recently and found it to be a good way to get all the complex compiled libs you need for a scientific python environment. Even better, their conda tool lets you create environments much like virtualenv, but without having to re-compile stuff like numpy, which gets old very very quickly with virtualenv and can be a nightmare to get correctly set up on OSX.
The only thing missing was an easy way to switch environments - their docs suggest running python executables from the install folder, which I find a bit of a pain. Coincidentally I came across this article - Virtualenv's bin/activate is Doing It Wrong - which desribes a simple way to launch a sub-shell with certain environment variables set. Now simple was the key word for me since my bash-fu isn't very strong, but I managed to come up with the script below. Put this in a text file called conda-work