Python quite limited ? You've got to be kidding me
Companies like Google or the NASA make an extensive use of Python, and I need not explain that they're far from being insignificant
Python is popular for being "batteries included", having a rich and versatile standard library which is immediately available, without making the user download separate packages. The
Python Library Reference sums up what is available without installing anything else : regular expressions (re), data compression (zlib, gzip, bz2...), text manipulation and formatting (string, codecs, formatter), file manipulation (os, os.path, filecmp...), serialization (pickle), web (urllib, ftplib, email, HTMLParser, xmllib...), multimedia (audioop, wave...), cryptography (md5, sha, hmac), simple GUI (Tkinter, turtle) and many more.
About object-oriented programming, this
tutorial explains how to do it.
It's one thing to learn the language, but knowing the API is really different. If Java looks more powerful, it's because they blur the frontier between the language and the API.
And should you need something not present in the Standard API, there are many excellent third party librairies available : PIL (Python Imaging Library), PyGame (videogame dev), wxPython (extensive GUI library)...
The only case where Python really falls behind is if you desperately need speed : in that case, it's better to go with C/C++.
A pretty entertaining way to discover the possibilities of Python is by doing the
Python Challenge, "the first programming riddle on the Net" as they defined themselves.
In the end, it's just a matter of taste