Right now, DataFrames is handicapped by problems with how DataArrays was designed. With some revisions coming in Julia 0.4, it should be possible to fix a lot of the worst problems (esp. performance) with DataFrames.
The combination of DataFrames and multi-threading will be really amazing, when we get there. I personally use it quite regularly for production work, over pandas - and as John says above, with Julia 0.4, DataFrames will be much better.
I think that being not faster than Pandas is pretty good, since it is written in C and heavily optimized.
