Python Can't Find Platform Dependent Libraries -- Mac Homebrew Install

Question

In an effort to purify my environment I have recently eliminated MacPorts and all traces therein from my Mac OS 10.6.6 box, replacing it with the hip new Homebrew (https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew).

Today I ran into my first problem. I'm attempting to install Python 2.7.1 (Mac OS X still defaults to 2.6). I ran brew install python at the Terminal. Everything seemed to install fine. When I ran python however, I received this output:

pygmalion:~:% python
Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix>
Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jan 24 2011, 12:12:00) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

At first I thought it was an inconsequential error message, but upon further investigation, I've come to see that Python is very much lacking its core system libraries. I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling, playing around with all different values for $PYTHONHOME and $PYTHONPATH but so far no luck.

As far as system information: brew appears to have installed Python in /usr/local/bin/python.

pygmalion:~:% brew --config
HOMEBREW_VERSION: 0.7.1
HEAD: 38b93387ea732d6c6b08a491f74124854b28107a
HOMEBREW_PREFIX: /usr/local
HOMEBREW_CELLAR: /usr/local/Cellar
HOMEBREW_REPOSITORY: /usr/local
HOMEBREW_LIBRARY_PATH: /usr/local/Library/Homebrew
Hardware: dual-core 64-bit penryn
OS X: 10.6.6
Kernel Architecture: i386
Ruby: 1.8.7-174
/usr/bin/ruby => /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby
Xcode: 3.2.5
GCC-4.0: build 5494 
GCC-4.2: build 5664 
LLVM: build 2333 
MacPorts or Fink? false
X11 installed? true

Thanks in advance... I'm at a loss.

Edit: Here is the output of sys.path.

Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix>
Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jan 24 2011, 12:12:00) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys
>>> sys.path
['', '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/lib/python27.zip',    '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/lib/python2.7', '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/lib/python2.7/plat-darwin', '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/lib/python2.7/plat-mac', '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/lib/python2.7/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages', '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/lib/python2.7/lib-tk', '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/lib/python2.7/lib-old', '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/lib/lib-dynload', '/Users/dlobraico/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages', '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/lib/python2.7/site-packages', '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages',        '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.1/lib/python2.7/site-packages']
>>>