You say that like it's a bad thing. Python is a multi-paradigm language, allowing you to pick (or create) the idiom that is best suited for solving the problem at hand. It is not a straitjacket language that tells you how to think.

The use of "=" for assignment is only confusing if you are already used to using for equations, and even then it's only confusing for a very short time, since it's obvious that the two (assignment vs equations) are completely different things. Python is hardly the first language to use it, by the way; I got started with BASIC on a Commodore 16 which used X=X+1, before I even knew about equations.