I did something very stupid. I was copying some self written packages to the python dist-packages folder, then decided to remove one of them again by just rewriting the cp command to rm. Now the dist-packages folder is gone. What do I do now? Can I download the normal contents of this folder from somewhere, or do I need to reinstall python completely. If so - is there something I need to be careful about?
The folder I removed is /usr/local/lib/python2.7 so not the one maintained by dpkg and friends.
The directory you removed is controlled and maintained by pip.  If you have a record of which packages you have installed with pip, you can force it to reinstall them again.
If not, too late to learn to make backups; but this doesn't have to be a one-shot attempt -- reinstall the ones you know are missing, then live with the fact that you'll never know if you get an error because you forgot to reinstall a module, or because something is wrong with your code.  By and by, you will discover a few more missing packages which you failed to remember the first time; just reinstall those as well as you discover them.
As an aside, using virtualenv sounds like a superior solution for avoiding a situation where you need to muck with your system Python installation.
Accidentally removed dist-packages folder, what to do now?