> What functionality does such a thing actually need?

I think the requirements should be:

* The resulting symbol behave exactly like None. IE: the symbol should not be an instance of object, but an instance of its own class

* A symbol can optionally be globally unique.

* Two symbols created by the same key must not be equal. IE: they have equal key, but different value

* if we're trying to create global symbols with the same key, an exception is thrown

This is mostly based on the Javascript spec.