I think that Parallel is more interesting as an instant server-farm for "taco bell programmers" -- q.v. http://teddziuba.com/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1818816 for the HN discussion -- as per Mr. Dziuba's definition.

Like, async spidering with parallel is a one-liner, but comparatively, have you seen how much absurdly syntaxed pycurl boilerplate you need? It's crazy. I for one will take the simpler method any day.