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1) Whether enough people with little to no programming experience feel the urge to create code.

Yes, the amount of work that is waiting to be automated is enormous, and the number of people who are semi-technical is huge. If a programming language can connect the two, it will be very popular.

2) Whether enough people can be bothered to install the runtime to run said code.

Py2exe takes care of that on Windows. On Linux it's pre-installed.

3) Whether we continue to have no problem wasting resources on inefficient code or whether we move towards more virtualization/containerization where the individual VMs have to do with very little CPU time.

When your software engineers cost $100,000 a year and your machines cost $200 a year, you have to be running very large workloads for performance to matter. And while those aren't uncommon, there are far more programs that aren't performance-sensitive (whether measured in lines of code or their productivity or the number of programmers).

And C++ isn't even the biggest competitor to Python, that role belongs to Javascript.

That depends. Is there an automated tool to create and deploy such EXE wrappers yet?

Not that I'm aware of, probably because it's about five lines of C#. It would also be doable fairly easily from Python as well, but it seems kludgy to make a Python script to find the proper Python runtime then call it on another Python script. Read HKLM\SOFTWARE\Python\PythonCore\$MAJOR.$MINOR\InstallPath (or HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Python\PythonCore\$MAJOR.$MINOR\InstallPath on 64-bit Windows if you want 32-bit Python), if the key doesn't exist then display an error (preferably with a link to download the proper version), otherwise run $InstallPath\python.exe $SCRIPT.py.

That being said, again, most Python programs will ship with their own Python runtime (with py2exe or similar) if they depend on a specific version like that. Additionally, if you have users with enough smarts to be able to figure out installing Python on their own and don't expect them to change the installation location (or this script is just for yourself), you can obviously use a one-liner BAT file, but I wouldn't expect to see that outside of closed deployments.

I'll agree it's not as simple as it is on Linux distros (although some use python27, and some use python2.7, for instance), but it's certainly not difficult.

And harder when your program relies on third-party libraries that have not yet been ported to 3.

This I fully agree with, and is unfortunately true. However, most libraries on PyPI have been ported to Py3k these days (at least ones with ongoing development). A list of PyPI packages that haven't been ported to Py3k yet can be found here. You could (most likely) easily run 2to3 on other libraries yourself, and fix whatever minor problems arise. It would be harder in libraries with C extensions, but it's almost always trivial for pure Python libraries.

Yes I'll chime in in favor of Python here too. It can easily do everything you need with a stock install, including unit testing, GUI, executing command-line commands, and generating web or email content. Plus it is easy to turn Python scripts into standalone executables http://www.py2exe.org/ Powershell would also get the job done, but it is not nearly as elegant.

There's always tools that convert a python script into a Windows executable...a quick search turned up this. Similar tools exist for packaging other scripting languages, including batch files. You can even package Java apps as exes without requiring an installed VM, though he'd probably get some grief for distributing a 50m executable that could've been written as a 10k batch file.

But anything involving Python is going to presume that a compatible interpreter is installed on every system that hosts it.

py2exe and py2app can help there, although I'm in the process of dealing with their poor support for eggs.

The standard win32 dist of python is (only) about 9MB. There is also py2exe which bundles your bytecode with a slimmed-down interpreter.

Like someone else said, freeze does this for unix executables. Py2Exe does this for windows exe files.
Hope that helps.