Agreed re Python allowing non-OO-ness.

But:

Python is a fairly small, simple language that doesn't present opportunities for wizardry.

There are fewer opportunities for wizardry than in Perl, it's true (though to be fair there are cases where Python doesn't need wizardry ;-) but if you don't use objects in Python you'll overlook a lot. Examples include decorators, metaclasses, manipulating object construction using __new__, overloading of __setattr__ and __getattr__ and other namespace/dict hackery, bytecode hacks (see http://entrian.com/goto/ for instance), replacement of function code, etc.