Been playing around with the Python 2.6+ buffer protocol this morning.  Notes:

• it appears that ctypes could support buffer-supporting objects being passed as pointers natively (i.e. at C speed), but it doesn't seem to (at least with my cursory tests) there would likely be a lot of corner cases that would need to throw errors
• there doesn't seem to be a hook at the Python level to say "my object can fill in a buffer on demand"?
• the constants and one of the "functions" are defined as macros, so not ctypes-friendly for working with them

there are still some things that the array protocol in PyOpenGL provides that aren't there at the moment.

• support for lists/tuples of equal-typed values (this isn't supported if you turn on ERROR_ON_COPY anyway)
• ways for (python coded) objects to participate in the protocol (e.g. a wrapper object such as a VBO that passes "special" pointers (actually offsets))
• ctypes parameter types that can access other parameters *after* conversion to buffer types (e.g. to get the dimensions of another argument)

I've altered PyOpenGL (a few days ago) to drop a number of (complex) wrapping steps when ERROR_ON_COPY is True, as with that case we can pass in many types and let the from_param of the argument handle them directly.  Anyway, good to see the buffer protocol moving forward, very good to have packages able to share data efficiently.