> So the question is whether it is really useful to enforce unbuffered
> stdin with the '-u' option (or your example is simply too borderline).

Hard to say.  It seems at least possible that there are Python users for 
whom stdin being unbuffered (with -u) matters, so if there's any 
reasonable way of avoiding changing this it should probably be considered.

Though I have to admit that I'm not one of those users (I don't think I've 
*ever* used the -u option outside of testing...).