Astroturfing generally requires a company backing the movement. Why would a company care enough about pip and virtualenvs and then want to hide that? I didn't see an alternative offered besides using existing open source tools.
And after reading it, I've realized I've been plain wrong in how I've been constructing my python related Docker containers.
Full disclosure: I love pip. I love virtualenv. I use them religiously.
I also work for the Docker team.