Right now I'm developing mostly in C/C++, but I wrote some small utilities in Python to automatize some tasks and I really love it as language (especially the productivity). 
Except for the performances (a problem that could be sometimes solved thanks to the ease of interfacing Python with C modules), do you think it is proper for production use in the development of stand-alone complex applications (think for example to a word processor or a graphic tool)?
What IDE would you suggest? The IDLE provided with Python is not enough even for small projects in my opinion.
Refactoring is inevitable on larger codebases and the lack of static typing makes this much harder in python than in statically typed languages.
Is Python good for big software projects (not web based)?