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Please have a look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pywikipediabot/Survey2012 all, and edit if neccessary. If nobody disagrees for a few days, I will start the project.
My plan is to write a notice to wikipedia.py somewhere around line 7875 where initial checks are. This will check the Python version and look for a config variable in order to not annoy people who have already visited the MW page. But this variable will be published on MW only. :-)
I think this is a somewhat BIG DECISION and you should wait more than "a few days"! E.g. I myself noticed this just by accident.
Additionally I do not think it is appropriate to change the code (wikipedia.py, config.py, ...) just to add a notice for such a "short term survey" (as you planed it). Either you add this notice permanently (which would make sense since the support for all earlier version is up to be dropped forever) or you have to do this survey for much longer time... (in earlier mails something around august was mentioned - I think this is much more sensitive - in my oppinion you could even wait till august '13 ;)
Last but not least: not supported does not necessarily mean we have to actively remove bits that work around quirks for a certain version; rather, it means we won't fix bugs due to an old python version.
I would be more radical. What I would like to see is a cleaner code without unneccessary branches, and free use of some basic tools such as conditional (x if cond. else y) that is widely used in the world of programming. But let's see the survey first.
I would agree with the first statement! We should not waste time in actively remove code that handles older python versions. Also because other might still want to use older python versions (we do not support those anymore does NOT mean we activley have to prevent their usage!).
If you want to be that radical, I assume you should change to use the rewrite branch - since as I am aware there a more radical approach is implemented already (with cleaner code and and and).