Interesting points. I disagree with Reason 2 though. Python has smoother installation than Java and GCC.

One of the reasons Python is popular is because it's easy to do a lot of things. Some python choices don't make sense technically, but they were made to make python as easy as possible. Performance was never the first criteria of Python (or ruby). My personal peeve is with mandatory indentation. But again, that's the idiom the language has adopted.