[Pythonmac-SIG] machine architecture 32/64 with Python 2.6 on Snow Leopard?

[Bill Janssen]

I'm running /usr/bin/python on SL, and

    import platform; print platform.machine()

give me

    i386

But Activity Monitor shows Python as "Intel (64-bit)".

Is this a bug in platform.machine(), or am I misunderstanding what i386
means?  "platform.architecture()" returns ('64bit', '').

Bill