A really cool feature of the API is that you can convert a Pandas dataframe into a spatially enabled dataframe (SEDF), but surprisingly it will not work if your geometry column is in SDE format. You could convert the SDE geom to WKT, but my environment (and I'm sure i'm not alone here) is still in the stone age GIS wise (oracle with no spatial extensions enabled) so I can't do this easily.
For example, say I wanted to use Cx_oracle to query my sde and convert to an SEDF so I can use all the awesomeness of pandas to do data manipulation (adding fields, joins, updates, etc.). I can create a pandas dataframe, but if I try to convert to an SEDF I'll get an error saying that my SHAPE column is not iterable.
