Comment 9 for bug 365352

This breaks installation of applications like Mercurial that supply --prefix=/usr/local when installing. This has worked with previous versions of Debian and Ubuntu, and it works with most other distributions I'm aware of. It does this specifically not to interfere with distribution-provided packages.

Given that installing other binaries, resources, etc. to their /usr/local equivalents isn't an issue, I don't see why it should be for Python, using the canonical method of doing so with distutils.