3.0 was, yes, because some significant new bits weren't yet implemented in C.
Python 3.3 caught it back up to, and started to exceed, 2.7 on benchmarks. And the gap is only going to grow as the 3.x series improves and the 2.x series lies stagnant.
Yeah, but if you’re programming in Python then speed isn’t exactly high on your language feature priority list is it?
Performance and choice of language has in most cases no correlation at all.