i was able to reproduce this in clean 2.7
Sandro, this is only reproducible on systems without python - so by definition, you can hit this only during installation

as for issue8335, yes, i think that it's a duplicate

distutils2 is irrelevant here, because you can only install it on top of existing python. The problem here is that stdlib's distutils must use the newly built libpython, *not* the systemwide one - a problem that distutils2 don't need to solve until they become part of stdlib.