All you need to do is read this email and comment on whether you agree with the overall principle and then give your opinion on fifteen possibly controversial issues. That allows us to avoid starting the debate from scratch. I will try to make sense of the various responses. Keys have a list of subkeys indexed by name. Values have names.
Every value has a type.
That's the basic model. There are various helper facilities provided by the APIs, but really, the model is as above. It is convenient for Windows users to know that a Python module to access the registry is always available whenever Python is installed on Windows. This is especially useful for installation programs. There is a Windows registry module from the win32 extensions to Python.