You can have all this by using the time module's functions.

It is true that these don't work for all dates, but they are still
useful to have.

FWIW: mxDateTime has always had methods to convert the date/time values
to ticks and back again:

    http://www.egenix.com/products/python/mxBase/mxDateTime/

Since most of the datetime module was inspired by mxDateTime, I wonder
why these were left out.