I think you might be confused as to what Python's lambdas are for. The name is very misleading - it really should be called a function expression. It's just a shortcut for declaring a function with an expression. It's useful for situations where you need to pass in a very simple utility function, as is usually the case with list.sort() and its comparison function argument.

I'm not sure what points you're trying to make with your other complaints, but I guess if you "feel" things are hackish, that's OK. What you might consider feeble-minded hacks Python coders consider simple, straightforward implementations.