The question is whether "Pythonic," as the community defines it today, is optimal in all cases. As an analogue, there have been enough talks about things the Java community considers to be stylistically optimal that look really horrible compared to implementations in other languages -- like Python. :-) Pythonic style should be a guide, not an edict, and should be deviated from or redefined when it makes sense. The examples riobard provided already show the syntax weighing things down, a situation where syntax should give way to a more functional style approach.

As for it creating a cleaner language, I try to approach this, as with all things, from the perspective of being an language-agnostic programmer. From that perspective, I do like the python syntax for simple things like what you defined, but under heavier weight mapping and filtering operations, the map/filter function call syntax seems a lot cleaner. There's nothing wrong with syntactic sugar, but I would assert that it will tend to suck when it is all you have.