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Since the coercion to float is documented and intended, 
it's not "a bug" (it's functioning as designed), although 
you may wish to argue for a different design, in which case 
making an incompatible change would first require a PEP and 
community debate.  Information loss in operations involving 
floats comes with the territory, and I don't see a reason 
to single this particular case out as especially 
surprising.  OTOH, I expect it would be especially 
surprising to a majority of users if the implicit coercion 
in

somefloat == somelong

could lead to a different result than the explicit coercion 
in

long(somefloat) == somelong

Note that the "long" type isn't unique here:  the same is 
true of mixing Python ints with Python floats on boxes 
where C longs have more bits of precision than C doubles 
(e.g., Linux for IA64, and Crays).