I understand the feeling. However, in a project I maintain, we want the other way around - to be able to never have an empty list, even if the string is empty (we resorted to using re.split in the end, which has this behaviour). Consider:

rest = re.split(" +", rest)[0].strip()

This gives us None-like behaviour in splitting, at the cost of not actually using str.split.

I'm +1 on the idea, but I'd like some way to better generalize str.split use (not everyone knows you can pass None and/or an integer).

(At the same time, the counter arguments where str has too many methods, or that methods shouldn't do too much, also apply here.)

But I don't like bikeshedding too much, so let's just count me as +1 for your way, if there's no strong momentum for mine :)