Yes, that's just a strict keywordification of the * and ** symbols. The same argument could be made for eliminating the standard algebraic + operator and replacing it with a keyword "__add__". I don't think that's worthwhile.
Well, its not quite the same in the sense that algebraic operators are essentially part of 'natural language', or at least extremely widely adopted. They have earned their own special symbols. Argument packing/unpacking is a very specific thing; a small corner of a particular programming language.
However, as seen in the light of python 3 head-tail syntax, perhaps the above is not quite true, and one could argue that packing/unpacking of collections is indeed a quite general concept, deserving of its own symbols. Breaking uniformity with that use case would also be a bad thing; ideally, a verbose alternative to all occurances of collection packing/unpacking would be available.
That said, a more verbose and flexible syntax would be desirable there too; as of now, the tail is always a list. I havnt read the discussions leading up to those design decisions, but that seems like a compromise to me; something like head,tuple(tail) = someiterable would be preferrable there too, id say
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