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It matters more when you've got a statement broken over multiple lines. If you've got a function which takes a lot of arguments for example, lining them all up vertically can make the code a lot easier to read. This can be difficult or impossible to do with a proportional width font (and would almost certainly look very strange to anyone else looking at the code in a fixed-width font).

That's understandable. I agree that tabs would work much better than spaces with a proportional font. However, in the case of Python PEP 8 states that you should use 4 spaces. Not doing so will make it very hard to collaborate with other devs.

It's not that I think that proportional fonts couldn't work (even with python) It's just that I have concern about visually assessing indentation. Maybe it's time I try one and find out.

PEP8 recommends spaces: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/