I think it's actually very reasonable for a Path to have a path attribute
that's a string. The DirEntry has two string attributes: name (the last
component) and path (the full path). The Path object already has the
former. Adding the latter makes sense to me. After all you've gotta give it
*some* name, and 'path' is used (unsurprisingly) in this meaning already in
many places.

The shortest idiom in libraries wanting to support this would be

    path = gettattr(arg, 'path', arg)

This extracts the path attribute from a DirEntry or Path object, and
assumes the argument is a string otherwise. I think this is relatively
reasonable to encode in C as well.