The problem is caused by an old version of pyparsing that has been vendored into pkg_resources, which is now part of setuptools.
I think if you install an updated setuptools, things will run better:
python -m pip install -U setuptools
EDIT – After installing my own version of 3.10.1 on Ubuntu 18.04, I am having this same issue. And the broken pkg_resources is preventing doing any updates, so your classic Catch-22. To begin chasing down a resolution, I’ve submitted a ticket on the setuptools Github repo.
EDIT2 – Based on aid on the setuptools GitHub repo, I did the following steps:
# add deadsnake repo (default or nightly)
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
sudo apt install python3.10
git clone https://github.com/pypa/setuptools.git && cd setuptools && sudo python3.10 setup.py install
sudo apt install python3.10-distutils
curl -sS https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py | python3.10
sudo apt install python3.10-venv
At this point, I am able to run pip in Python3.10, and create venvs using python3.10 -m venv virtualenv-dir.