As people who are probably intimately aware of alternate ways of
authenticating to a django application, I wanted to bring the
following to your attention:
http://ianlewis.bitbucket.org/django-newauth/
I'm just looking through it now myself but it seems like a nice step
forward. I get the feeling that some people in the django project
itself are itching to solve this problem now that 1.4 is out but I
feel like the eventual solution will be in this direction.