FWIW, I've filed a bug about this issue for Fedora 15's python3 package here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=722578

Looks like this has led to an extra .pyc in the old location for every Python 3 .py file in Fedora 15's various python3-* rpm packages (as generated by distutils).  

rpm's post-processing has been generating .pyc files in the (correct) __pycache__ location (via rpmbuild's brp-python-bytecompile script, which uses "compileall").

For examples, see that Fedora bug report; so far it's affected every built rpm I've looked at.

I believe the impact of the extra .pyc files is merely wasted disk space within our rpm-packaged Python 3.2 stack.

I'm thinking of applying the patch to our downstream python3.src.rpm