Javascript's async story is far worse than Python's.
Yes and no. Python may have an great async core with Twisted and gevents, but it doesn't have an great async ecosystem. Most tools and libraries aren't written with async in mind and you end up having to roll your own in many places where Node either gives it to you out of the box or with well supported third-party libraries. After having written quite a bit of Twisted code I have to say I find writing async code in Node a lot quicker and easier, despite being a much more experienced python programmer.
Then try gevent. The monkeypatching they do means that most pure Python network code just works with it. For instance, I used the XML-RPC library that ships with the core with no further modifications beyond what gevent does.
It's less good than using a language with first-class support for continuation-style programming, but it's better than using a language that makes you be the compiler and chop up and manage the event handlers yourself.
Yes and no. Python may have an great async core with Twisted and gevents, but it doesn't have an great async ecosystem. Most tools and libraries aren't written with async in mind and you end up having to roll your own in many places where Node either gives it to you out of the box or with well supported third-party libraries. After having written quite a bit of Twisted code I have to say I find writing async code in Node a lot quicker and easier, despite being a much more experienced python programmer.