ArcMap v10.0 sp5 does solve this problem. Although you can not determine the version of an mxd in python, python will throw an exception instead of completely crashing if it encounters an ArcMap v10.1 mxd file. So if you are processing a large batch of mxds, you can use try except to catch ArcMap v10.1 files and then move on to the next mxd without processing the file.