We seem to be seeing more of this "don't eat your own dogfood" approach to software development lately. The other example that comes to mind is the Play Framework, written in Python and also targeted to Java devs.
I don't know if there will someday be a language that is as easy to work in as a Python or Ruby for simpler programs but which lets you get (almost) as fast and fine-grained as C as your features stabilize and you start to optimize, but while we're waiting for Godot, it's not too ironic to use different tools for different projects, even if the project relates to one language in particular.
(And I don't know why you were downvoted for this. Sheesh, downvoters.... I'm contradicting you a little with my post, but I see no reason why you shouldn't say what you think. So, after contradicting you, I'll now go and cancel your downvote with my upvote. How's that for irony?)
Have you looked in to Cython? It seems like it tries to do what you wrote.
From http://cython.org/
"The Cython language is a superset of the Python language that additionally supports calling C functions and declaring C types on variables and class attributes. This allows the compiler to generate very efficient C code from Cython code. The C code is generated once and then compiles with all major C/C++ compilers in CPython 2.4 and later, including Python 3.x. PyPy support is work in progress and is mostly usable in recent developer versions."
The latest Gevent dev uses libev (same as node.js) I'm curious to know how Cython and the new Gevent will perform vs the alternatives.