A while back I released a Django extension that makes it possible to raise exceptions for any HTTP status code. At the time this was mostly interesting to enable raising 403 Forbidden consistently; since the release of Django 1.3, and the introduction of class based generic views, this becomes more useful.
I’ve just uploaded a new version to PyPI which provides basic support for raising redirects as exceptions (basically, it does the exceptional processing even with DEBUG=True). At Artfinder I’m using it to implement slug redirects, where I’m overriding SingleObjectMixin.get_object to cope with slug changes without breaking old links; there are undoubtedly other useful things that can be done in a similar way.
At some point in the future, hopefully in Django 1.4, you’ll be able to achieve the same effect with some built-in support, but for the time being django_exceptional_middleware is still useful.