My impression is that GvR conceded a long time ago that Python is slow, and doesn't particularly care (and considers it trolling to keep bringing it up). The point is that in the real world this doesn't matter a lot of the time, at least as long as you aren't making big-O mistakes — and easier-to-use languages make it easier to avoid those mistakes.

For that matter, I recently saw a talk in the Python world that was about convincing people to let their computer do more work locally in general, because computers really are just that fast now.