I'm looking into writing a wxWidget that displays a graphical node network, and therefore does a lot of drawing operations.  I know that using Python to do it is going to be slower, but I'd rather get it working and port it later when its functional.  Ideally, if the performance hit isn't too great, I'd prefer to keep the codebase in Python for easy updates.
What I'm wondering is how much slower should I expect things to go?  I realize this is vague and open ended, but I just need a sense of what to expect.  Will drawing 500 circles bog down?  Will it be noticeable at all? What are your experiences?
For drawing, people have suggested PyGame. I like PyGame, its easy to work with and works well. Other choices would be Pyglet, or using PyOpenGL (you can most likely draw to a wx widget too, though I've never done it).
Personally, I'd do it in Python using whatever library I'm most familiar with (in my case, I'd use pygtk and cairo) and worry about performance only when it becomes a problem - then profile and optimize the bottleneck, if its Python code thats slow, I'll know which bits to run in C instead.
How much slower is a wxWidget written in Python versus C++?