So I was trying to emerge 'app-portage/gentoolkit', which had to emerge 'dev-python/argparse-1.2.1' as a dependency. However, 'dev-python/argparse-1.2.1' would not emerge, and the attempt would error out with "ImportError: No module named setuptools". It turns out that 'dev-python/setuptools-0.6.21' has to be installed on the system in order for 'dev-python/argparse-1.2.1' to get installed; however, it is currently not an automatic dependency. So 'dev-python/setuptools-0.6.21' should be an emerge dependency for 'dev-python/argparse-1.2.1' just like that is an emerge dependency for 'app-portage/gentoolkit'.
More on this issue in this thread: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-890870-start-0.html The thread reports that it is currently necessary to emerge 'setuptools' as a manual step before emerging 'argparse'.
Maybe you forgot to run python-updater? The dependency is in place, so that's not the issue here. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 428578 ***
