IPython and libreadline Don't Work On Mac OSX ... Unless

This annoyed for quite some time: a default installation of IPython (even sometimes with python libreadline bindings installed) doesn't work to smoothly: IPython apparently loads libedit (the BSD variant) which garbles your text when you type past so many characters and doesn't support contextual history completion, etc. I was able to solve this problem with the following:

$ sudo pip uninstall readline ipython

$ sudo easy_install readline ipython

Note that the second step should be "easy_install" - not "pip".