My guess is that they wanted to go the "self-contained" route as opposed to the "amalgamation of different libraries" approach (a la Pylons/Pyramid). This makes

My guess is that they wanted to go the "self-contained" route as opposed to the "amalgamation of different libraries" approach (a la Pylons/Pyramid). This makes it a lot easier to learn for true beginners since it eliminates the overhead of navigating the documentation of a multitude of different libraries . Tornado is so flexible, though, that it would be pretty straightforward for you to use whatever templating library floats your boat.