You are absolutely right, strictly speaking it is the same thing. Getting a simple 'Hello World!' from the server though is a different thing but it is by no fault of Apache, Python is just not PHP when it comes to web development in the sense that you need this:

  def wsgi_app(environ, start_response):
      output = 'Hello World!'
      status = '200 OK'
      headers = [('Content-type', 'text/plain'),
                ('Content-Length', str(len(output)))]
      start_response(status, headers)
      yield output

  # mod_wsgi need the *application* variable to serve our small app
  application = wsgi_app

Instead of this:

  <?php

  echo 'Hello World!';