While I appreciate the effort to make some more simplistic APIs available alongside their more complex counterparts - libraries like urllib2 are not expendable in the process.

In the act of making an API simpler and abstracting the details - you loose a lot of the detailed control provided by these lower level libraries. Perhaps you won't miss the 10% as outlined in the slides, but someone out there will.

Do we really need both? I think no, but then again for most of what I do, urllib2 just works; I'm not really the target for requests. Just don't expect that requests will ever replace urllib2.