I like Nick's original idea for a handful of convenience functions but want to caution against adding a bunch of tools that start guessing at what you want.  Adding automatic wildcard expansion, shell quoting/splitting and whatnot can make the module more arcane and harder to learn and remember.  

Please adopt a conservation approach adding the minimal set that has been shown to be necessary.  We can take these tools away if they turn out to have been a bad idea.  It is much easier to add cruft than to take it away.   In the itertools module, a number of tools started their life as just a recipe in the docs and only became builtin after having proved their worth and having proved their API.