Trying to remember some examples that I didn't like. The ORM mapper was ugly, and I think the templating system is really inflexible - like you can not use it isolated from Django, or it couldn't do "inheritance", or something like that.
The ORM is Django's most powerful component, IMO. The syntax can look a bit off-putting at first (the double underscore stuff) but it's amazing how productive it can be at the sort of queries that make up the bulk of any web app. I guess maybe it's an acquired taste.
Inheritance is a key concept of the template system, and one of its most useful features.
You absolutely can use the template system outside of Django, but it's not available as a separate package so you still end up with the rest of Django is a dependency - definitely not ideal. Jinja is a very neat rewrite of Django's template system that is available as a separate package.
Back then, there wasn't one obvious place to start with web app development with Python. Frameworks existed, sure, but there were too many and none were as good as rails. Django changed that, arguably helped along by Guido's pronouncement as the "official" way to go.