I digged into python File nonsense trying to find a size() method, and the best explanation I got is that File doesn't have a size() method because it's not meant to designate a file but a strange mix of input/output stream/reader/writer. And since you can't really navigate into python code, I had to google quite a lot to get this explanation.
Best part of the story ? Actually I use django and it has a sane File class with a size() on it, just that it's not appearing in google when you don't send the right request (and IO is pyhton base stuff, not web stuff in my head, so I didn't put the django keyword).