To be fair, V8 (the JavaScript engine under Node) is really, really fast. Even without introducing any event-driven code. Normal procedural code will (in general) be an order of magnitude faster than standard Python and Ruby runtimes.
"standard" run-times .. yeah, right. But try PyPy - same perf class as V8. And LuaJIT - probably faster than V8 - apart from GC. And for GC perf: Erlang does parallel (per "green thread") GCing ..
