To summarize some internal discussion: there was some discussion of putting this off to 4.0, but we decided that wasn't necessary. There's an argument that we shouldn't break the Session._init_ API in 3.9, but the Session docs explicitly say it's not to be used directly. Given that, it's worth breaking that API to fix the "Cluster.connect can return without being able to execute anything" bug.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40529241/unable-to-complete-the-operation-against-any-hosts-cassandra