I dunno if @zwieback was saying Batsh should target python, or if people should use python instead of Batsh, or something else, but neither of those first two suggestions makes a lot of sense to me.
Python's decent cross platform support doesn't really make it better for shell scripts, and while I use it for some shell scripts, I don't ever default to python. My comment was reacting to the "wouldn't you just", as though python is a natural default choice. In my experience, it's not a good default choice.
It's harder to debug python shell scripts, because you typically can't run individual lines, you typically can't cut and paste parts of it, you can't ever run system commands directly without wrapping it in a python module call, output might not display automatically, and you often have to install something that isn't already on the machine.
from subprocess import check_output as sh
files = sh(['ls'])
print files
This has its limits but covers a lot of basic use-cases for the backtick. I think some people first see an alternate way of doing this in Python that's a lot more hairy, even if more flexible, but it doesn't have to be that way...