Indeed. MacPorts has the additional advantage of using upgradable and removable packages, rather than polluting /usr/local (or worse, /usr) with unmaintainable detritus of various .pkg installers. MacPorts packages do occasionally fail to build, but (1) the maintainers do respond to tickets opened in their Trac system, and (2) most problems I saw had to do with Python packages, and MacPorts handling of Python apps seems to have improved recently.
Indeed, I now have a new rule: MacPorts provides everything I need except for Ruby and Python, which are always compiled from source into a separate location where they can pollute all they want.
