So yes, apparently the ARB listens when its remaining community screams.  This extension (as Lorenzo points out) has been promised to be supported by nVidia on all of its planned 3.x cards and it effectively "undoes" the deprecation of the legacy APIs in OpenGL 3.1.  So you can likely get away with not rewriting, as long as your card vendor is supporting the extension.

Yay-ish... I think.

I'm actually a bit ambivalent about it, can't say it seems like a good decision for competing with DirectX for game-development, but then most of the game devs are gone already.  Anyway, good for the PyOpenGL community anyway at least in terms of not needing rewrites (depending on the vendor, of course), and I guess we'll just have to assume that OpenGL will survive long-term as long as there is money being spent on it.