Mark, I looked at your patch again and think we should support relaxed
conversions for ordering comparisons but not equality/inequality.  This
will improve on the current situation where we get flat-out misleading
results for <, <=, >, and >=.  It keeps the status quo for
equality/inequality and thereby avoids the problems with __hash__.

The only thing that I don't like about it is that you can't do the usual
reasoning where "not a<b and not a>b" implies "a==b".  Still, it is an
improvement over "a<b" giving a completely useless and misleading result.