I added an implementation [1] in diesel [2][3], which uses select.epoll (or libev, on non-Linux systems) and got a around 150x speedup [4]. I only repeated the tests a few times (but they were all close) and didn't install the Go compiler so I could test against Go (I'd be interested to see how this stacks up on your machine). Like you say in your post, it's nice to have something wrap up the bother of epoll for you.
[1] https://github.com/wmoss/Key-Value-Polyglot
[2] diesel.io
[3] https://github.com/jamwt/diesel
[4] The first run is against the diesel one
wmoss@wmoss-mba:~/etc/Key-Value-Polyglot$ time python test.py
real 0m0.134s
user 0m0.040s
sys 0m0.020s
wmoss@wmoss-mba:~/etc/Key-Value-Polyglot$ time python test.py
real 0m20.164s
user 0m0.096s
sys 0m0.072s