Python uses too much memory?

There's a common attack leveled against Python applications that they take up too much memory, by people who understand the language difference (against, say, C) and by people just looking at their process list. This is often esp. evident on the newer x86_64 computers.

So as the Fedora Python maintainer, and a yum developer (an application written mostly using python), I figured it was probably worth investigating what the difference really was.