In the 1.2 release notes it states that due to changes made to the template caching layer it is now much easier to work with non-django template languages.
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.2/#template-...
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.2/#template-...
If you're after Jinja2, wouldn't you find it more interesting to work with a minimalistic stack like Werkzeug, SqlAlchemy, couchdbkit... ?