I think you glossed over the 'configuration' that adds friction to Maven adoption. Namely, the pom.xml file. You could argue that its complexity is typically overstated, but the fact remains that it exists and most developers will have to interact with it at some point or another. That's simply not the case in many other systems.

> No need to worry about which version of what is installed on this machine.

That's not a concern when using NPM (out of the box), and when using virtualenv it's not a concern when using pip (which most Python devs do).