I agree with you completely. Recently we created a small web app (http://hnwatch.scalien.com, Hacker News Watch) which already had a python back end for crawling and text processing, so we decided to try out python instead of choosing php which we were already familiar with.

We decided to use apache+mod_wsgi as it seemed the most performant option to use, and then we realized that you cannot use python as you would php, but you have to use a framework to do even the most simple things.

What's worse, with mod_wsgi python caches the interpreter between page requests, which means it also caches modules with errors, and randomly runs several versions of the same file!

So we hacked mod_wsgi to not to cache, and also created a minimalistic framework (150 lines) so that file deploying is like with php and you can easily use GET parameters, cookies and even mixed html and python code between <? and ?>. The only drawback is that python use indentation, so you have to be careful when writing one-line codes etc.

Now it is working correctly, but I was constantly wondering that nobody did that before us. Still I'm not sure we shouldn't use php again :)