But, er. Does this really matter? Yes, you can get "hello world" in PHP with one line of not-PHP. You can also get "hello world" in Python + Flask with seven lines, and you'll get half a dozen extremely nice features for free that you can learn about as you go.
Arguing about what stack has the simplest way to build from total scratch is a sad race to the bottom. I'd rather be making the point that rich Web development can be easy, not that cobble-your-own-thing-together-with-duct-tape can be easy.
So yes, it really does matter in the context of this thread. On the whole I agree with your philosophy that frameworks are there for a reason: you get many features for almost nothing.
But sometimes you just don't need a framework, you need something quick-and-dirty that just works.
PHP "is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML" [1]. Python "lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively" [2]. They can both do the task of the other, but the upstart time for a developer to handle the task of making a web app is smaller for PHP.
I've never taken the non-framework approach with python for anything significant, but how does it handle cookies, GET and POST fields, sessions, and file uploads? In PHP you'd have $_COOKIE, $_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION, and $_FILES as built-in global variables.
Are these differences still insignificant?
[1] http://php.net/ [2] http://python.org/