I think that is not a really fair comparison, Python with PyPy is pretty fast. Actually I would like to see a comparison for Python on PyPy vs JS in IonMonkey/V8.
There was just a higher incentive to optimize Javascript as it was pretty slow to begin with and was exposed to a lot more users (in the sense that it runs on clients rather than servers) than Python, Ruby and Perl
I think that PyPy is pretty impressive.. I also thought that IronPython's performance was impressive.
If you look at the link to the followup post, it does show that in certain use cases NodeJS does a lot better... though without any code to review/reproduce it's hard to say.
I happen to like JS.. Python's probably next on my list of languages to learn, but right now, I'm so deep in getting more proficient with NodeJS + Grunt + RequireJS, it isn't funny... our next-gen stack is much more NodeJS and MongoDB as a few tests, and backend processes have shown them to work very well together...
We have a newer site on ASP.Net MVC 4 (started as 3, with EF), and an aging site built on layers of .Net cruft since 2006 that's nearly unmaintainable) ... So I'm trying to structure things moving forward so that they will be well maintainable for the future as much as possible. Which means some new, and some bleeding edge stuff.
It also means some things I just don't care as much for... I actually like how the OneJS/Browserify takes CommonJS/NodeJS patterns more than AMD (RequireJS), but AMD seems better for the client side... I also don't care for Jade so much, but it was a group decision, and going that direction to share templates for email/client/server usage.
Still working out sharing Backbone models, etc... it's all work. Sorry for blathering on.
If I were doing desktop development, I'd be far more inclined towards Python today. As it stands, imho JS is a better fit for web development.
Edit: First hit on Google shows that jited Python (PyPy) is very close to jited Javascript: http://blog.kgriffs.com/2012/10/23/python-vs-node-vs-pypy.ht...