I was at the PyGrunn meeting in Groningen recently. Holger Krekel (https://twitter.com/hpk42) gave a talk about the problems of pypi and compared it to CPAN, and then showed some new work he was doing to help fix the multiple issues. He loves CPAN's searching, testing, multiple mirrors etc.
He has slides but I haven't seen them published anywhere, but the praise for CPAN was great and mighty, and it's good for Python to see someone basically wants to make the Cheeseshop more like CPAN :) -Mallory