Yes. Yes it does. Also, because it works on two type systems it has many cases were you'll want to take a look at the generated C code to verify that the "cheap path" was taken and no intermediary Python objects are constructed or Py operators are used -- if performance matters, that is.

On the other hand it is a radically simpler way to write bindings that also contain logic, or to write rather fast code without straying to far from Python. Plus, it can cythonize almost all code, even very dynamic code with closures, which will still often improve performance on it's own (no interpreter, but still Python runtime for every op). And that is then a nice base to do further optimizations.