I think no matter what scripting language we pick, X people would say "OMG awesome!!" and Y people would say "no way not that one!!". We've investigated a few, and picked python for several reasons, one of which being it has got very good C/C++ integration which makes it very flexible for Construct.
Also for highly algorithmic stuff (tight loops with lots of variables), Python is almost certainly faster. In Construct if you add to a counter or global variable or whatever, you still have the overhead of jumping in to an action, whereas Python just knows to increment a variable and probably does this in a very optimised fashion. That's part of the use of having Python. There will also be bindings to call actions (and possibly conditions and expressions) from Python itself, but when you do this you still get the overhead of jumping in to an action.
As for SDKs, Python plugins etc. we have plans to significantly improve the modularity of coding with events, and python fits in to this rather neatly. We'll be announcing more stuff in future <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" />