There is "Pyed Piper" aka `pyp`
https://code.google.com/archive/p/pyp/
"Pyp is a linux command line text manipulation tool similar to awk or sed, but which uses standard python string and list methods as well as custom functions evolved to generate fast results in an intense production environment."
That's cool, but I feel like you're unlikely to run into it very often in the wild? The vast majority of Linux systems come with ruby/perl out of the box. Plus if Python did support this sort of hackery it would quickly garner most of the bad press Perl has over the years :'(
Who cares? It's on pypi (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyp/2.11) so just `pip install pyp` and then you have it. You're probably not going to want to distribute shell scripts that rely on pyp, but if you're distributing scripts you can just distribute scripts written entirely in Python and use pyp for your own one-liners.
The lack of something like Perl/Ruby's -n and -p switches is a barrier as well. Those are handy because they automatically work for either piped input, or files named on the command line.
Of course, you can do all of this in Python, just not as a one liner.
However, Ruby completely inherited this aspect of Perl and is another good candidate. It's just even old systems have a perl installed that will perform the awk like functionality.