So the import warnings were added for sys.meta_path and sys.path_hooks because prior to Python 3.3 you could empty out those values and import would continue to work, but with importlib that stopped being the case. My thinking was that it would be easier to debug if you got that warning instead of your imports entirely failing and wondering what was going on. But perhaps sys.path_hooks and sys.meta_path are known well enough at this point that the warnings are superfluous. I'll open a separate bug to track that discussion.