Because Python is slow, Python is not used in scenarios where speed is crucial. That much is true.
However, if Python was faster, it would be used in those scenarios, so more people would be using it for speed critical code so it would provide real gains for a great many Python programmers.
This is exactly what happened with JavaScript: before V8 JavaScript was in exactly the same position as Python. Not many people were writing large programs in JavaScript because JavaScript was too slow. V8 sped up JavaScript 10x+ and people started writing much larger apps that do require that speed. If JavaScript speed suddenly dropped to pre-V8 speeds, we would all find the most popular web apps unusably slow.
It's probably worth noting that Google already attempted a V8-like transformation for Python with Unladen Swallow, and that that attempt mostly failed. Perhaps it was just prioritized differently, and that's why V8 was successful and Unladen Swallow wasn't.
Because Python is slow, Python is not used in scenarios where speed is crucial. That much is true.
However, if Python was faster, it would be used in those scenarios, so more people would be using it for speed critical code so it would provide real gains for a great many Python programmers.
This is exactly what happened with JavaScript: before V8 JavaScript was in exactly the same position as Python. Not many people were writing large programs in JavaScript because JavaScript was too slow. V8 sped up JavaScript 10x+ and people started writing much larger apps that do require that speed. If JavaScript speed suddenly dropped to pre-V8 speeds, we would all find the most popular web apps unusably slow.