A lot of this sort of functionality which is appearing at the moment from MS was built into a fantastic spreadsheet called ResolverOne which was released back in around 2008 by a company in the UK called Resolver Systems. It was based on IronPython and allowed an entire spreadsheet to be exported as a Python package.

The company never seemed to gain traction, and unfortunately the open-source tool released which was based on ResolverOne had none of the power or elegance of the original.

I'd be interested to know if MS had consulted Giles Thomas from R.S. prior to this - it's certainly giving me a bit of deja vu.