> Even something that should be as simple as piping output from one process to another in Python is a nightmare, and fraught with opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot with buffering deadlocks and other nonsense.

This is true, but when I am writing a script in Python I generally don't need to pipe as often as I do in bash. Python offer many replacements for things that in Bash you need to call another process.

That is, of course, if performance isn't necessary. When it is bash is still unbeatable because of the pipes.