http://plope.com/static/noncoptimized.txt
That's 27 lines of profiler output, which, if you're keeping score, is still fewer lines than any other framework tested. We're not really hiding anything here.
The comparisons to other frameworks are largely a gimmick to drive traffic and comments, granted. In the real world, these numbers shouldn't make the difference about whether you choose one framework or another.
However, there are actual speedups to be had by other Python web frameworks if they'd consider using some of the techniques outlined in the blog post. In the real world, actual benchmarks seem to have Pyramid bottlenecked by the WSGI server (see for example http://blog.curiasolutions.com/2010/11/the-great-web-technol...), so the optimizations we're doing are working, AFAICT.
Of course that speeds up the code. But it reduces the Python profiler output by more than it speeds up the code. Therefore measuring the speedup by looking at the Python profiler is inappropriate.