Ah, sorry.  I was looking at the 2.6 documentation, not the 2.5
documentation.  In 2.6 (which is what the new SSL code is for),
documentation of socket.ssl has been removed entirely, along with the
text that you cite, although the functionality from 2.5 socket.ssl is
still provided for backwards compatibility.  In 2.6, the ssl.SSLSocket
type is a subclass of socket.socket, so you call "makefile" on it to get
a file-like object for reading and writing.

If you'd like to submit a patch for 2.5 and 2.6, I think this is
backwards-compatible enough to qualify as a fix, not a feature enhancement.