You can get about 10x by compiling Python using PyPy. So compiling is not nothing. Using Numpy alone is about 5x which surprised me. There is a lot of missleading stuff out there about how to make Python fast. Lot of people say CPython is pretty fast or that using a binary library like numpy is fast. No CPython is very slow and libraries are not always that fast.

Edit: Another compiler is Numba which is more specialized. It can get 30x on some code without numpy. Again compiling can help.