I figured if this ran from a clean install successfully, that would be sufficient because otherwise we will have to make decisions about all sorts of options to offer. For the purpose of setting it up to run once, the echo to .bashrc or .profile actually doesn't matter as it will only help once they've restarted their terminal session (you'll notice I manually source the script right after for the duration of the install/setup procedure).
I chose bash because it's fairly straightforward and is the default for ubuntu installations. Thoughts?