It'd have been really nice to have that PEP in as it'd have helped me not have to write local imports everywhere.
As it is, top-level imports IMHO are only meant to be used for modules required to be used in the startup, everything else should be a local import -- getting everyone convinced of that is the main issue though as it really goes against the regular coding of most Python modules (but the time saved to start up apps I work on does definitely make it worth it).
Yeah, imo that's the way that python should've worked in the first place.
Import-time side effects are definitely nasty though and I wonder what the implications on all downstream code would be. Perhaps a lazy import keyword is a better way forward.