When developing something serious, you typically want to match the stack you will be deploying on. So far, the two easiest (not necessarily wisest) options have been Google App Engine and Heroku, with latter being my choice of late due it running on AWS and "closeness" to S3 and DynamoDB.
Our video is indeed starting a django project for you - we take a step further and let you do that in a click without having to set up a virtualenv, and it's all hosted. This is the basics, but the idea is to move your development onto a hosted server that is the same or much closer to your prod environment.
Ideally, this hosted environment can offer you much more than what you get by installing a different version of everything you’ll be using in production onto your laptop.
I definitely see the benefit for those not utilizing such practice already.