Speed comparisons between Ruby and Python are kind of silly. Ruby 1.9 and JRuby are (if you look at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all... ) comparably fast to Python, and obviously measure up slightly better against Python3.

Python is not a radically better choice in terms of speed (and hell that's true even w/ 1.8. Sure Python's faster, but we're not talking orders of magnitude here).