Yes and no. In the Python community, we're taking all of that pretty seriously. The scheme community may not seriously be thinking of getting rid of those things, but it's hardly impossible that some people think it might be better off without it.
Lambda is a primitive in Scheme; in some implementations of scheme it's used to implement things like temporary variables (let), sequences (begin) and looping (named let/letrec).
Python has other ways of doing these things; and removing things that has been obsoleted or superfluous makes sense, for Pythons ideal of having one canonical, explicit way to program.
Having a few very abstract primitives that the rest of the language can theoretically be built upon is one of the reasons why Scheme/Lisp can work as a programmable programming language.
Scheme is like Go - a few abstract rules that can be combined in endless, sprawling ways.
Python is like (hmm, better let some pythonista answer this. I'm thinking of a game with a clear thematical connection (like Monopoly or The Creature that Ate Sheboygan) and a few explicit rules that combine in ways that is supposed to have a clear, readable, consistent result). Maybe shogi?
(I don't usually read comp.lang.python and I really don't want to offend anyone. My apologies if this post is either annoyingly obvious (and thus contains only stuff that's been said a million times), or totally wrong.)
Sunnan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
