Unfortunely, the project did not have a real business use case. People believed that peer-to-peer is a thing (XMPP, BitTorrent, IRC) and this would drive mobile-to-mobile interactions. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be true.
Later me and my friend ported Python to Series 60 with our own rewrite, as Nokia’s official port had many issues. Unfortunately by this time Series 60 was already losing market share for iPhone and Android. Furthermore we found that because of module import delay, Python will never be a good run-time for mobile applications, unless you do some sort of a binary dump/prewarmed up interpreter.
If you really care about the startup time, you could pre-compile it. Nuitka and Cython could do this with different limitations.
The problem you mention can be significant because some design patterns in Python encourages this. Eg function arg with a default that’s expensive. Unfortunately this whole speeds up repeatedly calling the func, the cost is paid at first import.
Of course all of this was labelled as research and wasn't taken too serious by the business units until it was too late. A pity, because a lot of the stuff that NRC produced wasn't bad. There was a thing called friendview that existed before foursquare was a thing where you could share your location on a map with friends. The team that did that also did another app that allowed people to share photos. Instagram was not a thing yet back then. Another team was doing a thing called sports tracker. These were tiny teams doing amazing things. Sports tracker basically was allowed to take their software outside of Nokia and create a company around it. Nokia shipped a lot of stuff like this via Nokia Betalabs. A lot of that stuff came from teams in Nokia Research Center.