Native threads that are locked against each other by a GIL, are still native threads, but less useful native threads. An important purpose/use of native threads is that they are scheduled by the OS and not hindered by a GIL, so that in multicore machines multiple threads can run concurrently.
> it has native threads (that feature alone puts it head-and-shoulders over Python)
As I wrote previously (and both you and lisper apparently decided to ignore), Python uses OS threads as well.