derek,
your reports of the os X installer are almost spot on the same as my experience. i found that it worked ok, but there were a few glitches (such as the gui, hid, the 'tab' key mysteriously stopped working...etc) ...that's why i was sticking to my tried and tested 0.37 installation.
i don't think that it's a problem for people to have to install pd for themselves, but as hans said..."The major sticking point right now is that most Pd devs use their own build system, instead of all us using one. If we all used the same build system, all of this integration would happen more or less automatically."
THIS is fundamental.
if every package could just work with < ./configure , make , make install > (or whatever) it would be a lot better
but that's not just a pd problem... it's everywhere in linux based software