[hampusw]

There's nothing keeping you from running a separate web server and then proxying requests to Node using HTTP. Why is it a problem that you do this using HTTP? What alternative protocol would be so much better? FastCGI isn't really that different (each have their pros and cons) and CGI has obvious problems...

WSGI applications can use a built-in HTTP server too (or FastCGI or ...). Node has an internal interface (similar to WSGI) for handing over requests to the web application and so on. That's not fundamentally different from WSGI. The main difference is that WSGI is a standard API, so there are several "WSGI servers" implementing the same thing (each of them similar to Node in some sense).