I am a fairly proficient vim user, but friends of mine told me so much good stuff about emacs that I decided to give it a try -- especially after finding about the aptly-named evil mode...
Anyways, I am currently working on a python script that requires user input (a subclass of cmd.Cmd).  In vim, if I wanted to try it, I could simply do :!python % and then could interact with my script, until it quits.  In emacs, I tried M-! python script.py, which would indeed run the script in a separate buffer, but then RETURNs seems not to be sent back to the script, but are caught by the emacs buffer instead.  I also tried to have a look at python-mode's C-c C-c, but this runs the script in some temporary directory, whereas I just want to run it in (pwd).
So, is there any canonical way of doing that?
I don't know about canonical, but if I needed to interact with a script I'd do M-xshellRET and run the script from there.
There's also M-xterminal-emulator for more serious terminal emulation, not just shell stuff.
Running interactive python script from emacs