Python and Python Bridge in Leopard

This is a question about the excitement about “Python Scripting Bridge” in Leopard.

If I am a noobie to Objective C, would learning Python make it easy to build a cocoa application without learning Objective C in detail?
Purpose is to build a cocoa GUI to parse and display values from an xml file.
Was initially planning to use facespan and Applescript to parse and display an xml file.

A previous post about “using applescript and perl to parse xml files” in this forum suggested using Perl-bridge or Python-bridge for this purpose.
With leopard, Is there anything new in applescript that could speed up xml processing?