Of course Python isn't up to the task of device drivers, but C isn't the only language that can do that. You could write a driver in Rust, which is a significantly safer language than C.
By comparison, C's runtime is very simple and assumes very little, so it's good for writing code in a kernel or integrated system where many OS services won't be available to you. It's also much faster, of course, and it gives more direct access to memory.
I mean, you could, there's no real technical blocker, but it'd be horribly slow. Plus many failure modes of touching hardware are very likely to break the VM process and make debugging very challenging
The problems include:
- performance: implementations being interpreted, and relying on dynamic typing mean that Python is almost always slower than compiled languages.
- the run-time: Python assumes that things like allocations are always OK, and generally requires more operating system support than is available in low level environments.