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I'm not experienced in import machinery. Here is preliminary patch which 
implements my idea for particular case.
Performance effect is almost so good as manual caching in a global.
>>> import timeit
>>> def f():
... import locale
... 
>>> min(timeit.repeat(f, number=100000, repeat=10))
0.09563599999819417
Of course it breaks tests.
> It's possible there is room for other optimisations that don't break the
> import override semantics (such as a fast path for when __import__ is the
> standard import function).
Good idea.