There are benchmarks around [1], though I consider them valuable only for the entertainment value.
The great thing about uWSGI/Nginx over Gunicorn/Nginx is that Nginx speaks the uwsi protocol natively[2], whereas with Gunicorn Nginx acts as a proxy.
Also, in my experience (2 years with gunicorn, 1 with uwsgi in prod), uwsgi is more stable, uses less memory, has better management and configuration tools and even lets you run multiple Python apps under the same intepreter (multitenancy) [3].
So you can serve a production site using Python's wsgiref and SimpleHTTPServer?
Servers do matter - memory usage, throughput, error rate, concurrent request handling etc. If the options are to use a faster server, or hunt down your code for bottlenecks, the choice is clear. Even if I modify my code to be faster, a faster server doesn't hurt.
This "benchmarks are useless" meme is overdone. "Hello World" benchmarks don't matter, but if a server is significantly faster on my real world application, why would that benchmark be meaningless for me?
It would be very similar, you'd just need supervisord or something similar to run gunicorn for you. There is a pretty complete example of deploying gunicorn + nginx in the docs: http://gunicorn.org/deploy.html
