Calvin Spealman set me straight on the true importance of LINQ. Unfortunately the paper doesn't scream the fact that LINQ is designed to be customized based on the data store by fully translating the query code at the CLR level to be specific to the data store. So, for instance, SQL queries can be translated to CLR code for SQL from the lambda expression. So it actually translates the code at the bytecode level to be more efficient.
Now that is more impressive and something Python does not do directly, yet. But with the AST now in, we should end up with an exportable AST that can be directly worked off of to allow something similar to be done if someone decided they wanted to put the time and effort into implementing something like this. But I would not expect to have code-level access to the AST prior to bytecode generation until Python 2.6.
