Well, what else did you have in mind? Remember that until we fix the GIL (which won't happen until Python 4) you won't get benefit from async programming unless you are overlapping with I/O, and (due to the limitations of select/poll/etc.) that is pretty much limited to network and IPC (disk I/O in particular cannot be overlapped in this way).
The main other area of interest would be UI events (as in a browser or GUI) and for that I think an adaptation of the asyncio event loop will be suitable. (If you're not going to use them it's fine not to implement the network-specific methods on an event loop.)
Note that the async/await keywords themselves have no direct link to an event loop -- they are just a different way to spell generators. It's just that they are only useful with asyncio or some other event loop library.