• quite a bunch of very mainstream 3rd party libraries and software that are widely used, are quite not pythonic. A few examples : soaplib, openerp, reportlab. Critique is out-of-scope, it's there, it's widely used, but it makes the python culture confusing ( it hurts the motto that says " There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it "). Known pythonic successes ( such as django or trac ) seem to be the exception.
• the potentially unlimited depth of abstraction of instance, class, metaclass is conceptually beautiful and unique. But to master it you have to deeply know the interpreter ( in which order python code is interpreted, etc. ). It's not widely known and used ( or used correctly ), while similar black magic such as C# generics, that is conceptually more convoluted ( IMHO ) seems more widely known and used, proportionally.
• to get a good grasp of memory and threading model, you have to be quite experienced with python, because there's no comprehensive spec. You just know what works, maybe because you read the interpreter's sources or experienced quirks and discovered how to fix them. For instance, there are only strong or weak references, not the soft and phantom refs of java. Java has a thread for garbage collection while there is no formal answer about when garbage collection happens in python ; you can just observe that garbage collection doesn't happen if no python code is executed, and conclude it's probably happening sometimes when trying to allocate memory. Can be tricky when you don't know why a locked resource wasn't released ( my experience about that was mod_python in freeswitch ).

Anyhow, python is my main language for 4 years now. Being fanboys, elitists or monomaniacs is not a part of the python culture.