It's a blessing if you need to manage a range of legacy systems, because Perl "just works" while Python is crapshoot.

That might be true if you already don't like writing Perl, but I have many years of experience writing system administration scripts in Perl, and I'd pick it for that task over Python any day.

I can understand why someone who prefers Python would go that route, but it is definitely not more capable than Perl in that domain.

I'm not so sure about Python's advantage over Perl regarding sysadmin tasks...