Well, perhaps the usual suspects can get another infoworld self-promotion article out of it.
The basic REPL causes serious problems for beginners, and the differences in this REPL are (intentionally or not) largely geared towards fixing those problems. Most notably, beginners can't reliably paste in code examples from tutorials. Either there's a use of `input` which eats the next line of code as interactive input, or a blank line inside a block which the REPL interprets as end-of-code (causing the rest of the block to report `IndentationError`s despite being correctly indented for the intent of the code). They also commonly get tripped up by `help` and `exit` being Python callables rather than REPL commands, and get put off by the lack of built-in screen clearing. (Historically - as it turns out from forum discussion - the Python devs have expected that people actually quit the interpreter with ctrl-D/ctrl-Z, and clear the screen with the terminal emulator's functionality for doing so.)
These days anything is justified by the hypothetical needs of beginners, the same people who are used and incited by the Python ruling class to flag posts and report people on discuss.python.org, in the same way that Mao operated in the cultural revolution when he felt his power waning.
Mostly by not using it at all.
REPL doesn't maintain a state, atleast not complex enough state to be relevant to most things. People only use it for hello world kind of demo and don't touch it ever again.