Or it might have just been merged into the time module. The datetime module is mostly a single class which wraps the functions in the time module and adds a few convenience methods. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason for the separation is just historical -- say, time was written to match the C library, and later someone donated datetime as a set of utilities with an OO interface.

Anyway, since the common utilities in that are all attached to the datetime class in that module, there's no harm in importing the class directly. You could even fix the naming yourself, if you were so inclined:

    from datetime import datetime as DateTime
    DateTime.now()