I feel like that reasoning should be outlined in the tutorial. As a newbie, it seems like a pain to get django running if I have to set up a VM just to do it, and the author provides little explanation.
Coming from rails, its weird to me that he seems to emphasize their 'gem install' equivalent over their bundler equivalent.
That's because there isn't really a good "bundler equivalent" that I know of. That was one of the more frustrating parts of Python work for me. Virtualenv is kind of a hybrid between gem and bundler, and it works, but it's nowhere near as elegant.
The jobs are divided a bit differently but the combo of gem/rvm/bundler is matched quite nicely by pip and virtualenv (with virtualenvwrapper adding some nice conveniences)
This article covers some of the equivalent jobs using Ruby and Python:
Coming from rails, its weird to me that he seems to emphasize their 'gem install' equivalent over their bundler equivalent.
Otherwise, a great tutorial.