To expand on "real binaries" a bit. It's somewhat ironic, but distributing statically compiled binaries for common systems is actually easier than distributing source (or bytecode) for VM-based languages like Python, Ruby, and Java.
True statically compiled Linux binaries for complex applications are surprisingly hard; libnss insists on dynamically loading, and libstdc++ doesn't like it either. I think we ended up with unpleasant RPATH hacks to load the copy of the standard libraries that shipped alongside the app rather than the system ones.
