Get crackin'. It's a breeze to learn, and you'll be writing more robust scripts than in bash in no time.
Of Zed's complaints, I feel that two are misguided (time handling seems quite reasonable to me, and I've never seen an easier documentation system than Sphinx).
I think applying the "del" keyword to objects in a container is a mistake in the language, but that's how it was designed, so it probably wouldn't have been changed in the 2 -> 3 transition. It certainly won't be changed now -- the best that can be hoped for is for its use to be discouraged in the documentation.
Install/Uninstall of modules is fairly easy, but requires all concerned parties to work together. Otherwise you end up with half-installed, broken modules. There are PEPs in progress to work on this, but it's a social/political problem rather than a technical one.
Python's file-manipulation APIs are an ongoing calamity.
This is simply false. Modules were added, renamed, and modified. Module names now conform to pep 8 (Queue -> queue, SocketServer -> socketserver, etc). cPickle, cProfile and cStringIO are now accessible through their non-c counterparts instead of individually. Packages have been grouped - for example the http libraries are now in http.* instead of the top level.
Examples of API changes include the removal of sys.maxint and sys.exitfunc and friends, many libraries returning unicode strings instead of byte strings by default, and lots lots more.
Consult the "What's new in python 3.0" for a high-level overview: http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html#library-changes
I was under the impression that Python 3 broke a lot of backwards compatibility, so could they not introduce new APIs with that? Or is that in fact what they did, and Zed is just complaining about 2.x?
I apologise if I'm mistaken on this, I've hardly used python at all. (though I keep meaning to learn it so I can finally stop writing bash scripts)