You could build 95% of an application with the traditional request-response model and add the 5% of real-time featurs with a system similar to my demo.
(Of course, given your opinions on Django, I don't recommend you build anything with it.)
We've implemented some SSE based solutions lately with gevent & nginx in front of django, and it's been great to keep it all in the django family.
Maybe switching to py3k has some value after all... =)
All those things by themselves could be considered trivial and could be gotten from many individual libraries - the level of integration and polish you encounter with Django is anything but trivial though and takes real time and effort.
I've recently had to make a choice for a Python based application platform/environment and have chosen Django (again) despite having no use for the ORM and ORM-using contrib modules. Simply because all the other things are there and work together beautifully without me spending any time on code that is not directly related to my goals.
In the long run they might build tulip-awareness into the ORM.
For that matter I start Tornado servers with management commands just for convenience...
This blocks in a separate thread leaving the event loop to handle other tasks.