Found a nice post on this kind of stuff here. I haven’t implemented all of it by any means, but the omnifunc code completion and snippetsEmu are quite nice. Also did my own hacky perversion of the :make command. .vimrc excerpt follows...

" py stuff
autocmd BufRead *.py set smartindent cinwords=if,elif,else,for,while,try,except,finally,def,class
autocmd FileType python set omnifunc=pythoncomplete#Complete
autocmd FileType python set makeprg=python\ %