from * import
That's an additional magic incantation people have to learn to add to the start of every file. In PHP, that magic incantation is invisible because they never have to type it or even know that it exists.
I was kidding (and lost the final asterisk); I would lose a lot of faith in Python if that ever worked. :)
Maybe new devs should learn Perl, instead... http://search.cpan.org/~adamk/Acme-Everything-1.01/lib/Acme/...
From what I can see and aside from the ease of install, it is the namespace. You type <?php and you have hundreds of functions at your disposal. Not the case with Python or Ruby where you need to understand imports and global objects.
Sometimes everything not being an object helps, but only in the short run.
It's not great, but it's the easiest to grasp.