I wonder if this has any effect on the plans for CentOS? Somehow I suspect there would be more wailing and gnashing of teeth from that user community. (Not a criticism, just an appraisal of what CentOS folks do and how they're set up.)
CentOS still has python2.6 as the default. Several people I know who use CentOS with python just build their own python2.7 anyway -- at $dayjob, I build python2.7 and package it up with fpm[1] and drop it in our internal repo.