Now that I think about it, maybe we don't need a deprecation warning.

http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#public-and-internal-interfaces

says:

"Imported names should always be considered an implementation detail. Other modules must not rely on indirect access to such imported names unless they are an explicitly documented part of the containing module's API, such as os.path or a package's __init__ module that exposes functionality from submodules."

abspath isn't in __all__, so it's arguably not part of the public API, anyway.