>> It is. globbing is a well-known operation that many people expect to be easily done.

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_%28programming%29) - "The noun "glob" is used to refer to a particular pattern, e.g. "use the glob *.log to match all those log files"". 

IOW, globbing is usually understood as the act of expanding a pattern to the files it matches. Nothing in that implies recursive traversal of a directory tree. On the other hand, os.walk and/or walkdir suggest that in their name.

>> Which "Python spirit" are you talking about? We have many high-level
tools in the stdlib.

There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it. 

Admittedly, we already have more than one, and a high-level tool is proposed with Nick's walkdir. Why add *yet another* high-level tool?