My previous dablings into mobile app development were first with the old Palm OS (plain old C) and a bit of J2ME (oh the horror). Compared to that UIKit is bliss.
I understand the python runtime is pretty compact. Thus I'd expect there to emerge solutions similar to what is currently done with C# code. Just wrapping the runtime in the app and having the code as resouces in the app bundle that get fed into the runtime when the application launches.