I'm not into all that panic about leaving Flickr, but for some other reason I've recently made http://zalew.net/2012/01/11/django-flickr/ to sync Flickr into a Django app. It doesn't download the actual files yet so I was going to somehow implement parts of the Python script you mention to let it work as a backup tool too (unless somebody forks me and does it earlier <wink wink>).
I was serious when I said I just created it. We're working on a set of export utilities and Flickr is the first. Expect something to be functional in 2 or so weeks.