Giving people concise syntax for passing anonymous functions allows one to implement a lot of control-flow operations, and combinators from functional programming, as libraries, rather than language constructs.
In python, although they could technically be done as libraries, from a syntactic point of view, having to declare named functions and pass them explicitly as arguments rather defeats the elegance of the approach.
So instead we have special features and syntax added to the language, like with statements and list comprehensions, which are limited special cases of what can be expressed more generally with a nice syntax for passing closures as arguments.
Not that it necessarily matters, there's always a pythonic way to do the equivalent thing. Although a lot of the time it's more imperative, and my taste is for functional programming idioms where possible.
In python, although they could technically be done as libraries, from a syntactic point of view, having to declare named functions and pass them explicitly as arguments rather defeats the elegance of the approach.
So instead we have special features and syntax added to the language, like with statements and list comprehensions, which are limited special cases of what can be expressed more generally with a nice syntax for passing closures as arguments.
Not that it necessarily matters, there's always a pythonic way to do the equivalent thing. Although a lot of the time it's more imperative, and my taste is for functional programming idioms where possible.