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Confirmed on Pythons 2.1.3, 2.2.3, 2.3.2, and current CVS.
More generally, split() doesn't appear to split on any empty 
(0-length) match. For example,
>>> pat = re.compile(r'\b')
>>> pat.split('(a b)')
['(a b)']
>>> pat.findall('(a b)') # but the pattern matches 4 places
['', '', '', '']
>>>
That's probably a design constraint, but isn't documented. 
For example, if you split "abc" by the pattern x*, what do you 
expect? The pattern matches (with length 0) at 4 places, 
but I bet most people would be surprised to get
['', 'a', 'b', 'c', '']
back instead of (as they do get)
['abc']