For those arriving around summer 2013, I believe some of this thread is outdated.
I followed this howto which recommends Vundle over Pathogen. After one days use I found installing plugins trivial.
The klen/python-mode plugin deserves special mention. It provides pyflakes and pylint amongst other features.
I have just started using Valloric/YouCompleteMe and I love it. It has C-lang auto-complete and python also works great thanks to jedi integration. It may well replace jedi-vim as per this discussion /davidhalter/jedi-vim/issues/119
Finally browsing the /carlhuda/janus plugins supplied is a good guide to useful scripts you might not know you are looking for such as NerdTree, vim-fugitive, syntastic, powerline, ack.vim, snipmate...
All the above '{}/{}' are found on github you can find them easily with Google.