Having never done embedded work, I don't have an opinion either way. There are people successfully doing embedded work with Python, though (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/240996/anyone-using-pytho...), though I would probably choose Lua over Python in most cases.

If I were teaching somebody who wanted to do embedded work (and Python/Lua/<insert "easier" language here> really wasn't a deployment option, which is very feasible), I would start them with Python to get them to the point of understanding how programming works, then switch them to a more appropriate language for the project. Teaching the algorithms in Python, then converting them to C is a great way to learn the difference between the languages and to introduce the resource management that occurs.