(1) Haskell is a compiled language, so you need to compile everything locally
(2) Libraries are unstable, because they are young and authors are too creative, so dependencies are unstable.
Maven, and whatever Python and Ruby have, can ship you everything you need to run. (Except for things that depend on C bindings, where they become just as painful as Haskell libs, for the same reasons)
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Cabal itself is fine. The problems are
(1) Haskell is a compiled language, so you need to compile everything locally
(2) Libraries are unstable, because they are young and authors are too creative, so dependencies are unstable.
Maven, and whatever Python and Ruby have, can ship you everything you need to run. (Except for things that depend on C bindings, where they become just as painful as Haskell libs, for the same reasons)