I wouldn't be averse to adding utility functions to some module where it would make sense.  Generally, I would say collections (it has a deque and default dictionary already), though there is already a proposed constructor called 'count' that returns the counts of all items in a sequence as a default dictionary (requiring that the items all be hashable).

The reason I'm not against utility functions is because then they would be usable for 3rd party non-list, non-tuple sequences, or even usable in cases like 'a = array.array(...); i = index(a, value)'.