Why do you say Python is applicable to so much more than Ruby? I don't see how this can possibly be true since they are both powerful scripting languages.
They are both powerful scripting languages, but I think the ruby community suffers from a monoculture around rails & web development. Python also has a strong emphasis on web development (django, flask, pyramid), but there are also large communities of people doing scientific / numeric computing (scipy, numpy), bioinformatics (biopython), games (pygame, pyglet), networking (twisted), education (MIT's 6.00 course), embedded stuff / robotics, etc.
It depends on your field, I guess. Scientific computing for example uses a lot of Python. Ditto for the geospatial field where both the proprietary packages and the open source ones use Python. Sometimes, it's not the language's power that matters but the field of application and the existing libraries and community.