With 1.9 came a shiny new tool to allow native status querying in vanilla Minecraft servers. This is a simple class designed to aid in retrieving any data from the servers.
See it in action: http://dinnerbone.com/minecraft/tools/status/
Protocol documention: http://dinnerbone.com/blog/2011/10/14/minecraft-19-has-rcon-and-query/
from status_query import MinecraftQuery
query = MinecraftQuery("localhost", 25565)
basic_status = query.get_status()
print "The server has %d players" % (basic_status['numplayers'])
full_info = query.get_rules()
print "The server is on the map '%s'" % (full_info['map'])
Fully open. Go wild.