I have not found suitable answer, so here goes my take, which builds upon @toszter answer, but does not use system Python (and you may know, it is not always good idea to install setuptools and virtualenv at system level when dealing with many Python configurations):
#!/bin/sh
mkdir python_ve
cd python_ve
MYROOT=`pwd`
mkdir env pyenv dep
cd ${MYROOT}/dep
wget https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/setuptools/setuptools-15.2.tar.gz#md5=a9028a9794fc7ae02320d32e2d7e12ee
wget https://raw.github.com/pypa/virtualenv/master/virtualenv.py
wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.9/Python-2.7.9.tar.xz
xz -d Python-2.7.9.tar.xz
cd ${MYROOT}/pyenv
tar xf ../dep/Python-2.7.9.tar
cd Python-2.7.9
./configure --prefix=${MYROOT}/pyenv && make -j 4 && make install
cd ${MYROOT}/pyenv
tar xzf ../dep/setuptools-15.2.tar.gz
cd ${MYROOT}
pyenv/bin/python dep/virtualenv.py --no-setuptools --python=${MYROOT}/pyenv/bin/python --verbose env
env/bin/python pyenv/setuptools-15.2/setup.py install
env/bin/easy_install pip
echo "virtualenv in ${MYROOT}/env"
The trick of breaking chicken-egg problem here is to make virtualenv without setuptools first, because it otherwise fails (pip can not be found). It may be possible to install pip / wheel directly, but somehow easy_install was the first thing which came to my mind. Also, the script can be improved by factoring out concrete versions.
NB. Using xz in the script.