Definition of equivalent
1: equal in force, amount, or value

Are you referring to memory space as what is actually stored in RAM? If so, that seems to be outside the scope here. I don't think anyone expected an interpreted language to have the same memory space as a compiled binary from C for example.

Concretely anything to do with Serialization, API (ctypes), network communication (non-serialization), etc will fail.

Regardless of the reasons above, 1 is never the intended default value of anything default initialized in any language I've ever come across.