The functions you can create with Python's lambda syntax are a bit limited, but that's a purely syntactical limitation: you can create named function just fine and pass them around.
(I agree with most of the rest of what you are saying.)
They are likely referring to the hoops you have to jump through to get early instead of late binding. The boilerplate becomes automatic after a while, but that doesn't make it pleasant.
Of course, closures and mutability everywhere don't interact well. You have to make copies of values manually before they get mutated away, if that's what you refer to by 'early binding'?
The functions you can create with Python's lambda syntax are a bit limited, but that's a purely syntactical limitation: you can create named function just fine and pass them around.
(I agree with most of the rest of what you are saying.)