I recently packaged a GNOME application written in Python with the autotools, which I chose over distutils purely as a learning exercise. If you fancy giving autotools a go you may find it to be a useful example (including glade, GConf, scrollkeeper, .desktop file and pixmap installation):

[bandsaw.sourceforge.net]

I found the GNOME Blog autotools files provided a good starting point.

The one thing I didn't find online was up to date information on setting up autogen.sh for use with GNOME. I was targetting GNOME 2.6 and ended up following largely out of date documentation. The correct approach is to checkout the latest version of gnome-common from the GNOME CVS server (don't use the 2.4.0 version that is packaged with many distributions; it is far too old to provide the right tools) and modify an existing autogen.sh to suit your needs. Band Saw's should be fine (for GNOME 2.6 at least).