> Which part of the changes do you consider unnecessary?

All the parts dealing with packaging, in particular Tools/msi.

> I understand there is a feature freeze on this branch (event though
> the changes in this case are well localized and not intrusive), so I
> will target primarily Python trunk for the inclusion of patches, but
> I will also maintain internally my own set of patches for Python 2.7
> (and in the wiki for those who are interested).

Instead of doing so internally, I really suggest to maintain a public
hg clone, either on hg.python.org (by your name), or on, say, bitbucket.