You could use glu to get round the Windows/Linux/OtherOS problem.
Well, I counted
GLUT to "some cross-platform-stuff like
SDL"

I guess that's the real problem with C/C++: you need quite a bit of stuff before you can actually get going.
Forcing the (unexperienced) user to fiddle with linker settings to include additional libs can be quite a confusion at the beginning.
Other packages run straight out of the box.
To stay at the topic, I've once started to make my effects (programmed in C++) modular and use python as a scripting system for synchronisation and compositing.
Doing all code in python doesn't make much sense in my opinion...