Admittedly, I generally write procedural and/or functional python code... but how is:

  class CPUInfo(dict):
	def __init__(self, *args):
		dict.__init__(self, args)

	def __getitem__(self, key):
		val = dict.__getitem__(self, key)
		return val

	def __setitem__(self, key, val):
		dict.__setitem__(self, key, val)

Different from:

    class CPUInfo(dict):
        pass

Doesn't the overrides behave just like dict does?