Compiling to .pyc files is still byte code that later the python interpreter will read in what is more or less a gigantic while(true)switch/case (operation_type). What you save with pyc compilation is just the text parsing of the source code.

How dynamic the language is, does however affect how feasible it is to do JIT compilation and here python has done itself a big disfavor of simply being too dynamic. Some attempts at JITing it have been done before (pypy, ironpy), usually by nerfing the language a bit to get rid of the most dynamic parts - something that is probably for the better anyway.