App Engine - Deploying Stuck With No Progression
Found the solution. For some reason I can't use the command while in the GitBash terminal - I had to use the Windows Command Line. This may seem like a silly mistake, but I hope that it saves someone some time in the future.
I have been trying to deploy my project for approx 1.5 hours but I don't seem to have made any progress. Up to 10 solid minutes pass after I run the "gcloud app deploy --project [my project name here]" and nothing ever happens. The console shows that it's attempting to process the command but never progresses to show anything (except that my python which statements failed - I can run Python fine though so I don't that that's an issue). I have tried:

following the quickstart guide (twice to make sure I followed the steps)
re-ran gcloud components install app-engine-python command
ran the gcloud components update command

I've also spent this time researching as many forum posts as I reasonably could but to no avail. If anyone has advice on how to resolve this I would greatly appreciate the assist.