Why does Guido think this is general purpose enough to add to Python but that the scientific features to make it competitive with R aren't? Is he envious of node.js?
Also, the main point of this is to allow for different async libs to find some common ground to stop the madness of having twisted-specific, tornado-specific, etc... The scientific community does not have this pb because everybody uses numpy.
Async interests potentially everybody, including the server guys, the backend guys AND the scientific community.
Not to mention that this is a few contained classes, whereas the scientific stuff is tons and tons of code to be included into Python, including lots of Fortran and C, that would more than triple the size of the standard library.
Lastly, node.js? Lots of languages have a good story for async, from C# and Scala, to Go and Rust...