I see where Bruce is coming from.

But I quite like self: it's an explicit reminder every time you write OOP in Python about the idea of classes & instances.

Incidentally I'm one of those annoying people that often will use this instead of self (because I find it more readable.. at work I am famed for my efforts of trying to write code in "english" :D).

Self is also useful when your passing the class around. It's easy to see where it is heading all the time.

It will be nice to see the "you forgot self, you fool" error made explicit. When you switch languages a couple of times a day it can be easy to forget :) (PHP to Python switch is the hardest!)