Following the MoveIt "Quickstart in RViz tutorial" after completing above steps is a good indicator if things are set up properly. Instead of using roslaunch and the pick-and-place.launch file, you ...
install Install one, more, or all versions from a python-build-standalone release. update (or upgrade) Update one, more, or all versions to another release. remove (or uninstall) Remove/uninstall one, ...
If you work with strings in your Python scripts and you're writing obscure logic to process them, then you need to look into ...