Seriously? What do you think it means to be a freshman? I am getting seriously tired of this attitude in the software community that you're only a legitimate programmer if you've been doing it since you were in diapers.
That's ridiculous. What level of skill do you expect in an introductory program aimed at freshmen? Because that description sure seems like it should be tailored to someone completely green to programming to me.
I assure you there are many that are. My first year at uni was filled with classmates that could barely operate a computer, there were many like myself that already had a good handle on programming and cs fundamentals but we weren't the dominant group. Most of the greens dropped out/switched majors after a year once they realized how hard it was. I hear from a lot of parents equating spending a ton of time on a computer with being tech savvy and a natural fit for computer science, this may be why most of them tried it out.
Well some introductory CS courses are taken by people in other majors. At my university, all science majors(as far as I know) have to take at least 1 introductory programming course. In that context, it makes sense to use python to introduce the concept of programming to people.