there is Ibis[0] as a fairly mature package. They recently adopted duckdb as the default execution engine and it can give you a nice python dataframe API ontop of duckdb, with hot-swappability towards heavier engines.
With tools like this providing a comprehensive python API and the ability to always fall back to raw SQL, i am not sure DuckDB devs should focus on the python API at all beyond basic (to_table, from_table) features.
Impressive progress and a real chance to shake up the data tool market, but still a way to go:
There is is still much to do especially on large table formats (iceberg/delta) and memory management when running on bigger boxes on cloud. Eg the elusive "Failed to allocate ..." bug[1] is an inhibitor to the claim that big data is dead[2]. As it is, we tried and abandoned DuckDB as a cheaper replacement for some databricks batch jobs.
I am quite curious about the plans for python dataframe like API for duckdb, and python ecosystem in general.