Sometimes you cannot easily not share state. The fact that you can use multiple processes to scale is not an interesting statement when comparing python to other languages because it is true for every language out there.
I think the GIL has made people in the python community too defensive: the GIL does not prevent from building scalable architectures in many cases, but it still sucks, and it would be better without. That's a limitation (and a tradeoff because it made development and integration with C easier). And there are scalable architectures based on threads (example: http://www.mailinator.com/tymaPaulMultithreaded.pdf) - "thread suck" has became a meme which slightly bothers me in general. Not a panacea, but a good solution when applicable.
The key to speed is to not share state, which Python can do fine. It's called fork.