James Pearson

Here's what I ended up doing:

# I really prefer Markdown to reStructuredText.  PyPi does not.  This allows me
# to have things how I'd like, but not throw complaints when people are trying
# to install the package and they don't have pypandoc or the README in the
# right place.
try:
   import pypandoc
   description = pypandoc.convert('README.md', 'rst')
except (IOError, ImportError):
   description = ''

and then using description in setup() as you'd expect.