This is related to the discussion we had at the PyCon language summit about C vs Python function binding.  If you create a partial instance and put it on a class it doesn't create bound instances.  This behavior is a tad surprising in my view.  At a minimum it'd be nice if the docs mentioned this.

True, this could be documented better - flagging as a docs bug. (It is mentioned at the bottom of http://docs.python.org/library/functools.html#partial-objects, but that could be referenced better from the main documentation of the function higher up in the page)

There's actually more to it than just an oversight though - partial() fills in positional arguments from the left, so using one as a method would require specification of a carefully crafted selection of positional and keyword arguments to ensure the instance was bound and passed in at the right point.

Indeed I completely missed the section at the bottom.  A note in the above section would be a useful addition.

With the introduction of functools.partialmethod in 3.4, marking this older docs issue as a "won't fix"