The addition of the arcpy walk fuction at 10.1 was a great help in replacing the ListFeatureClasses and ListDatasets functionality which are incredibly slow for large numbers of datasets within a workspace.
However, the results of the walk are not particularly intelligent. They don't contain useful properties such as dataset type. Therefore to ascertain type you have to put a filter on the walk function (rather than filtering the results) which has a massively detrimental effect on speed.
For example when running on a sample gdb containing ~5000 datasets arcpy.da.walk will return a dataset list in approx. 10 seconds when run without a dataset type filter. However, once the filter is added to the walk it takes several hours (somewhat counter-intuitive as it returns a smaller list)!
There must be a way to quickly access this information without deep diving into every dataset (which is what I suspect it is doing), as ArcCatalog displays this information within seconds in the "Type" column.
It would be very useful to have a more efficient pythonic way to get at dataset type!
