Can someone explain this unexpected raw_input behavior?

[Mike Kent]

It's often useful for debugging to print something to stderr, and to
route the error output to a file using '2>filename' on the command
line.

However, when I try that with a python script, all prompt output from
raw_input goes to stderr.  Consider the following test program:

=== Start test.py ===
import sys

def main():
    print "Hello world"
    raw_input("Press ENTER")
    print "Goodbye world"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()
=== End test.py ===

If I run it with the command line 'python2.5 test.py', I get the
following output:

Hello world
Press ENTER    <=== This appeared,the program paused, I press ENTER,
and the program continued
Goodbye world

However, if I run it with the command line 'python2.5 test.py 2>/dev/
null' (I'm routing stderr output to /dev/null), I instead get:

Hello world
                      <=== No output appeared, the program paused, I
press ENTER, and the program continued
Goodbye world

This indicates to me that the prompt output of raw_input is being sent
to stderr.  I did check the source code for raw_input, and it appears
to be sending it to stdout as expected.

I get this behavior on multiple OS platforms, with multiple versions
of Python.  I am building python on these platforms myself, but to my
knowledge, I am not doing anything special which could account for
this behavior.

Any suggestions or pointers on how to get the expected behavior out of
raw_input?