Real-world real-time web apps with Python equals Django + Orbited + Twisted

A couple months ago I asked Michael Carter, one of the guys who works on Orbited and js.io, about django/comet integration. He mentioned a project he's working on called hookbox (http://github.com/mcarter/hookbox/). I haven't had time to look through the code and it doesn't look like it's been updated since it was uploaded in Oct '09, but maybe someone here has played around with it.

> Hookbox is a comet server and message queue that tightly integrates with web application frameworks. The goal of Hookbox is to allow your web application (php, django, rails, etc.) to handle all of the logic pertaining to authentication, authorization, logging, message transformation, etc, while still hiding the hard parts of Comet.

Is Twisted + Django really that awesome? I would think that any gains you get from async programming in Twisted would be cancelled out once the computing gets to the Django bit.