Isn't C++ still pretty much the fastest language out there, except Fortran for some numerical applications? I thought that's the main reason to use it over Python/Java/etc.
And in regard to the first draft of a C++ program being slow until you spend lots of time optimizing it, when comparing to say Haskell, that is not at all my experience. I'm generally able to write clean and efficient programs in C++ on the first draft, and they are invariably more performant than if I had written it in a slower language, without a significantly greater amount of effort.
In case you want to state that a VM is like a language runtime in that case, C++ also needs one for handling exceptions, RTTI, global constructors/destructors, floating point emulation,...
And with Python you use heavily optimized native libraries (Numpy & co.) where it matters.
I'll take my RAII and destructors, thank you very much.