Questions about GIL and web services from a n00b

[Chris H]

So I'm in a startup where we are considering using python as our primary 
development language for all the wonderful reasons you would expect.  
However, I've had a couple of things come up from mentors and other 
developers that is causing me to rethink whether python is the right 
choice.  I hope this is the right list for this type of discussion 
(please forgive me if not and point me in the right direction).

We are looking to build an e-commerce integration product so the 
majority of our work will be linking external SOAP and REST based web 
service API's to our own REST based API and backend database.    I have 
had the following comments/questions come to me:

1. Are you sure you want to use python because threading is not good due 
to the Global Lock (GIL)?  Is this really an issue for multi-threaded 
web services as seems to be indicated by the articles from a Google 
search?  If not, how do you avoid this issue in a multi-threaded process 
to take advantage of all the CPU cores available?

2. Are there good web services frameworks available for building a REST 
based service?  I admit I have looked at web2py, Django, pyramid/pylons, 
and a few others.  SOAP seems to be pretty well supported but I'm not 
finding the same for quick development of REST based services for 
exchanging JSON or XML formatted data.  This is probably just my n00b 
status, but what tools are best for building a simple REST data exchange 
API?

Thanks,
Chris