I just checked and interestingly I also depend on easy_install (which I don't even use, but put it in there someday), nose and pylint. None of them gave me problems. I say if fabric and PIP are broken then fix them.
easy_install is irrelevant anyways, nobody in their right mind would use that on a production system.
I'm surprised having the hardcoded paths didn't bite you - of course, how frequently are you moving the interpreter, or installing multiple versions of the interpreter (with the same dependencies) with a shared bin dir?
easy_install is irrelevant anyways, nobody in their right mind would use that on a production system.