I have just installed TurboGears and this comparison has struck me.
The philosophy reminds me of Ubuntu which I like. I see this in the way the plans are to work with other projects, not collect code and to provide a good way to do things without lots of indirection to give so much choice that the while becomes unwieldy. Oh and to have good documentation and a professional look.
The installation also reminds me of Ubuntu, i.e. dead easy. For TurboGears you do need shell access (which will restrict your hosting options at the moment). If that is ok then providing you have Python 2.4 installed (Python2.4-dev on Ubuntu) all you need to do is download one tiny file and run one command line.
The documentation is a good start. An excellent first tutorial as web pages or as a screencast (80mb quicktime movie). Plus a clear Getting Started document. Again like Ubuntu which has a lot going for it on the documentation front.
Like Ubuntu the community is friendly (eg this for Ubuntu) and encouraged.
I guess both are new kids on the block (TurboGears very very new), but due to their policy of building on existing tools and software and having a desire to use "Not Invented Here" as a positive feature they are both moving very very fast.
I know I have looked at many Python tools/frameworks before and had positive things to say about them. But more and more my hopes for Python as a web application development platform are coming together. Compared to a year or so ago immense progress has been made (egg's, easy_install, sqlobject, cherrypy v2.x ...) and TurboGears is making best advantage of all these elements.
So I am now starting coding some of the little applications I want at home. Later I can see about hosting them as I am sure things are going to progress there pretty quickly (keep watching the TurboGears deployment page ;-).
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