Used Python for the past year at so at home and at school and find it fun, been on code academy since September just wondered what opinions were.
if you want to make web-based games, java would be better than c++. You can try to code games in python, but i expect you will be quite limited.
If you dont want to "hard-code" a game there are plently of game development kits out there. the Unity engine is definelty very powerful.
There are some fairly mainstream games done in python, Mount and Blade is the first example that comes to my head.
The majority of it certainly is, to use the mod development kit you need it and that basically gives you a blank copy of the basic game to do what ever you want with.