Exactly why I hope to work on getting (or see someone else work on getting) the new turtle module ported to work with Canvas objects. It has a couple very straightforward interfaces, and would be awesome for creating animations - and it has the added bonus of probably not being that hard to port.

Obviously a port of SDL (and thus all the libraries/modules that depend upon it, such as pygame) or pyglet is not likely to happen, but it seems like there will be quite a few simpler options. And this also opens the doors for other, web-Python specific libraries that use HTML/Canvas as their primary means of output...

JavaScript has a lot going for it, but it also has quite a few downsides. Just off the top of my head:

• A very obscure sense of "type." While Python is looser than many languages in this regard, Python throws the concept of type out the window. The prototype system, while incredibly flexible, is best used by people who already understand object-oriented programming. It's difficult to start with that.
• No strong set of coding rules/guidelines. Semicolons are semi-optional, variables can be declared but don't have to be, functions can be defined using multiple syntaxes... Many beginning (high school-aged) programmers are used to a system where there is One Right Answer. Programming introduces the idea that there is more than one way to solve the same problem. To throw JavaScript's notion that there is more than one way to express the same answer into the mix seems like too much.
• It's great that JavaScript can be used from within a web browser. However, doing anything meaningful using JavaScript with a web browser requires at least a working knowledge of HTML and the DOM. I'd rather focus on the basics of programming separate from that first.
• Speaking of web browsers, JavaScript implementations from browser-to-browser have nontrivial differences. Again, I'd prefer to focus on the bigger concepts without getting bogged down in implementation details.

As a high school computer science teacher, I can see a practical application of this. Currently, I think Python is one of the best languages to learn basic programming concepts with, in that it is relatively straightforward, powerful, and there's not much "voodoo" to prevent students from diving right into programming. It's possible to do some really cool things in Python with not much code.

However, one of the problems is that it can be difficult to give students a way to show off their code. Since it's an interpreted language, they can't just give an .exe or a .app file to someone else to show it off - they need to say, "Oh, go and install Python, and these libraries, etc." Yes, there are solutions such as py2exe and py2app, but getting these set up can be quite a task in itself. By running Python inside JavaScript, you basically open up the whole web-connected world as a potential audience to these budding programmers. It's much easier to say, "Hey, check out this link!" than "Hey, download Python (but get the right version) and this graphics library, then download my .py file, and open up a command prompt and type python blahblah.py!"

In the computer world, where Moore's law reigns supreme, I would much prefer to have an excuse to refresh my hardware every few years and take advantage of all the advancements of technology that have taken place in that time. It seems that Google has figured out how to make this sort of thing modular and easily swappable, so kudos to them.

I'm almost certain that's for cost reasons. Sure, Google could probably get Gigabyte to custom-make a board - but then they'd have to pay that much extra to custom-design it, and Gigabyte would probably charge them a little bit more. As it is, they can just use the same lines that Gigabyte is already running, and get the same hefty discount that Joe the Computer builder gets from the massive volume they're running.

I for one heartily agree. (And yes, this comment is me doing some achievement-grabbing).