Other than being a little confused at first about why it wasn't included by default, using south as a separate module is about as inconvenient as using any other python package that isn't part of the standard library.

For people who know about it, yes. But probably the biggest win from pulling it into core is that, here on in, a newbie will be told to get migrating stuff from the first tutorial they do, and thus get working with this particular best practice up front. Yes, it's always been pretty hard to do django for more than 5 minutes without finding someone urging you to use South, but you never know...