I've been following the py3k maliing list disscussion for this issue, 
and wanted to add a note about the proposed solution described here:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2008-April/013004.html

The reason I think this approach is valuable is that in all of the 
proxy classes I've written, I'm concerned about which behaviour of the 
proxied class I want to override, not which behaviour I want to keep. 
In other words, when I proxy something, my mental model has always 
been, okay, I want something that behaves just like X, except it does 
this (usually small bit) differently.

This is also why I expect my proxies to keep working the same when I 
change the proxied class, without having to go and update the proxy to 
also use the new behaviour.

So, yeah, very much in favor of a base proxy class in the standard 
library.