Earlier quoted context omitted.
The SQLAlchemy branch was intended to seamlessly integrate with the model api - in other words you needn't know it was there. I don't think it got too far. Form validation is not tied to the Django ORM.
That's funny, because when I was going through the newforms code, it had a lot of ties to the ORM.
And yet form validation is not tied to the ORM. The ORM is leverage where a form is generated from a model, but that's not what you said.