I don't think it's less of a hassle than PHP, but in the context of web development, it is. In PHP, your development environment is often very similar to your production environment.

I think the primary difference is PHP is web first: it was designed to be a language for the web above all. Everything else is tacked on. On the other hand, Python is useful for a whole array of problems and a website is just one problem you can solve with it.