Redhat now has "Software Collections" which take care of this sort of thing, so you can do:
yum install centos-release-scl
yum install python27
Then if you want to use if in your shell you would run something like:
scl enable python27 bash
Which sets up the correct environment variables (including PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH etc) and dumps you into a new shell - pretty sure it would't be too hard to make that the default.....
Just thought you'd be interested...