Seems to work for me:

$ virtualenv bug61783
$ source bug61783/bin/activate
$ curl http://tools.wmflabs.org/pywikibot/core.tar.gz | tar xvz
$ cd core
$ python setup.py install
$ python
Python 2.7.3 (default, Sep 26 2013, 20:03:06)
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

import pywikibot

The path looks comparable:
['',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/bin',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/distribute-0.6.24-py2.7.egg',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-1.1-py2.7.egg',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Pywikipediabot-2.0b1-py2.7.egg',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/httplib2-0.8_pywikibot1-py2.7.egg',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/lib/python2.7',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/lib/python2.7/plat-linux2',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/lib/python2.7/lib-tk',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload',
'/usr/lib/python2.7',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-linux2',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages',
'/home/valhallasw/bug61783/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/extensions']

except for the slightly different distribute version...

What version of setuptools have you installed? Anything newer than 1.1.6 (which is what ez_setup.py specifies)?

warnckew wrote:

I'm seeing the same issue if I move out of the source directory before executing Python. If I run from the core directory it simply imports it from './pywikibot', which of course is successful.

Python version: 2.7.3
virtualenv version: 1.7.1.2

So after 'python setup.py install' I do:
cd ..
python
Python 2.7.3 (default, Feb 27 2014, 19:58:35)
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

import pywikibot

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>

ImportError: No module named pywikibot

This happens even though the pywikibot modules appears to be in the path:

import sys
sys.path

['', '/export/scratch/morten/bug61783/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/distribute-0.6.24-py2.7.egg', '/export/scratch/morten/bug61783/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-1.1-py2.7.egg', '/export/scratch/morten/bug61783/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Pywikipediabot-2.0b1-py2.7.egg', '/export/scratch/morten/bug61783/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/httplib2-0.8_pywikibot1-py2.7.egg', (rest omitted for brevity)]

Change 121535 had a related patch set uploaded by Merlijn van Deen:
Bug 61783: also install root pywikibot package

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/121535

Change 121535 merged by jenkins-bot:
Bug 61783: also install root pywikibot package

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/121535

I was not able to use pywikibot in a virtualenv (installed using pip install pywikibot as in directions here: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65176) until I put a copy of user-config.py in my home directory.

Once I added user-config.py to my home directory, import pywikibot ran without error in the interpreter.