He always delivers. That's a trademark.
So yes, it's a big deal. It means something will come out of it no matter what, in opposition to everything that happened before.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread he really has egg on his face after denying Python's performance problems for so many years. I would have more respect if he had taken a firm stance that keeping CPython's interpreter simple had pedagogical value, but instead he (and other core devs) repeatedly argued that Python did not have a performance problem, and that's why it was OK to keep it simple. It took until major pref regressions early in the Python 3 lifecycle to break out of this mindset.
