I think that's the point: requiring the user to explicitly pass "self" rather than making it a language keyword mostly just gives the user an unnecessary opportunity to make mistakes.
Not really. You end up implicitly injecting some value into local namespaces instead of having a function that takes an argument.
The implicitness of methods working differently than normal functions > the implicitness of classes passing a first argument to methods.
def __init__(self, x, y):
self.super(x, y)