I'd like to see consistent usage by default, with specific examples using the older forms as appropriate.  The use cases Raymond identified are worth discussing (and the tutorial may be a good place for this), and well as mentioned in the reference docs for the '%s' % x and ''.format() operations (and string.Template(), of course).

I would not like to see different syntaxes randomly applied to different examples that happen to involve formatting, but where that's not the emphasis.