I like Python, it's a nice, clean language, a bit on the verbose side, but not enough to disgust me, and I like how it forces morons to properly indent their code, with which brackets and bracket matching become useless.
I also love its OO model; after seeing C++'s, Java's, and PHP's, I didn't like OO and thought it was a waste of time in most situations, but Python's OO got me interested for a number of reasons.
Compared to Java, Python is better for writing business applications, system applications, and any other applications for that matter, it's much nicer to work with, and has a sane powerful API. Then again, anything is better than Java to work with; only a kick in the balls would be worse.
Finally, it's the fastest of the popular scripting languages, slightly faster than Perl, and faster than PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript.