It's being hyped as a platform for writing scalable web applications. Not simple networking tools or little glue utilities, but large, complicated web apps that people have been using ruby and python to develop.
The reason why NoeJS is "fast" isn't JS. It's being event-driven. I also believe JS isn't as easy to work with as python by design, even thus there are zillions of JS coders. Most of the people indeed follow the hype, more than "wait, is this actually something I should use" (you also did follow the hype and got bitten by it, in fact)
Javascript performance has come a long way since the days of IE6.
Saying that node.js is more difficult to work with than Python is just a matter of perspective isn't it?
Like any technology, in the hands of individuals that know what they are doing it is really not any more difficult than anything else.
For me personally, the fragmented Python community was what scared me to Node.Js in the first place. This was year's ago now, so perhaps Python has gotten better at that, but from a getting started point of view Node.js was and still is pretty easy, at the time the only thing that compared in Python in terms of ease of use was CherryPy, but It was not stable enough at the time for me to feel comfortable staying with Python for the one library that was not production ready.