Peter Hunt has much good stuff in Mass Transit - How Python wins on the Web and Ian has already responded with Applications! Applications! Applications!.
Almost all of it I agree with. I have many times stressed the importance of WSGI and Paste. I think that getting hosting (the WSGI Servers), Deployment (Paste Deploy) and existing applications running on WSGI is essential and more important than frameworks.
But where we differ slightly is that at the moment is that I think there is a bit of a Chicken and Egg situation. Frameworks have a symbiotic relationship with the infrastructure elements (TurboGears particularly due to it's project style). They have been driving (and contributing) to the various elements as well as using them.
I believe that there are enough Python developers that it is fine and dandy if some are working on killer frameworks while others are building killer applications and still others on the infrastructure (WSGI, Paste, Setuptools etc)
Setup tools has moved on a huge amount because of the way TurboGears has stress tested it (equally if it were not for PJE's work on eggs and everthing to support them then TurboGears could not exist as a project).
In fact all the projects that TurboGears has adopted (CherryPy, Kid, SQLObject, MochiKit, Formencode) have moved on more quickly since TurboGears got going. Therefore as a framework it is has had a very positive influence on a whole raft of ways of building applications.
I suspect that we will see exactly the same for hosting, deployment and getting applications to function together within a single environment when TurboGears applications start appearing in large numbers (probably not in large numbers until after 0.9 is released).
Thus the abilty to create, host and deploy non framework applications has been helped by the work on frameworks. As a result all python coders are starting to reap the benefits and 2006 looks like being an exciting year for Python Applications.
[Update]
See Frameworks matter, too at Blue Sky On Mars for Kevin Dangoors (creator of TurboGears) view. Which ends with:
In summary, applications are ultimately what matter. The whole point of a framework is to help people make their apps more quickly. In that regard, frameworks do matter, too.
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