You would think that this would be a property of arcpy.Describe(fc) 8-)
Oddly enough it is displayed as a column available in ArcCatalog so it must be possible to retrieve using ArcObjects
The only place that dates seem to be accessible to a Python script is by parsing the metadata, but that seems to only be dates for metadata updates or geoprocessing tools, not all edits. Again you would think... that this would be a critical piece of metadata that would be in the automatic update function.
I see that if you use ArcCatalog there is a date modified showing on the featureclass properties which corresponds to one of the encrypted files in the filegeodatabase folder. So that is the modifled date, it is just not available to us plebs. A scan of these tables will give a number of dates, so we might be able to get a range which is not much use.
At 10.1 there is a new system for logging all edits per feature with a user and datetime, but you would have to turn it on.
Meanwhile we need a 'date modified' hack. Perhaps the new API for file geodatabases will give up the value?
