That was more or less Python's fault, rather than PyGame, which uses SDL also. I remember getting a huge speedup for one game with import psyco; psyco.full(). It's going to continue being true that Python + whatever is going to be slower than almost any other lang + whatever, even with more GPU support. But still, lots of games (even shippable ones) are possible, and lots of non-game applications. I'm still in love with the pygame/SDL1 way of doing 2D graphics, it was just so straightforward, and working with their interfaces and abstractions (pygame.sprite was nice) rather than SDL directly was always more pleasant too.