In the 'coercion rules' section of the reference manual, at:

http://docs.python.org/dev/reference/datamodel.html#id5

it says:

"""Over time, the type complex may be fixed to avoid coercion."""

In 3.x, the complex type has (necessarily) been fixed to avoid coercion, 
and it ought to be a fairly easy task to backport that fix to 2.7, for 
someone who wants to get his or her feet wet with some CPython hacking.

As far as I can see, there's no great benefit in such a change, except 
that the presence of coercion for the complex type causes confusion 
occasionally: see issue 3734 for an example of this.