GDAL install on Mac OS X Lion

Homebrew works great for me. To install GDAL 1.9 with Homebrew all you have to do is

      brew install gdal

Homebrew requires xcode, and I think commandline tools. More information can be found here

How about using the precompiled binaries available from http://www.kyngchaos.com/software/frameworks

Also, are you using 1.7.1 for a specific reason? 1.8.1 is, I believe, the current release build.

Caveat: I do not know if Lion is yet supported by the GDAL OSX binaries.