Iiish. For small projects or when you want to get development versions etc that are not in a distro's repos it's pretty common to have to do a make-configure.

Then again, with Python in particular, I have often had errors either with pip-install, or after "successful" installation, for various reasons.

In this case, we were talking about Python itself. I don't see any particular reason why most people should need to build it themselves, whether on Windows or on Linux. Packages are another matter, but here the issue is the way Python itself is packaged on Ubuntu.