Seams boxing isn't too much of an issue for vanilla python when summing 1000,000 integers.
$ pypy -m timeit "sum(range(1000000))"
10 loops, best of 3: 55.2 msec per loop
$ python -m timeit "sum(range(1000000))"
10 loops, best of 3: 71.5 msec per loop
$ python3 -m timeit "sum(range(1000000))"
10 loops, best of 3: 62.7 msec per loop
$ python -m timeit "sum(xrange(1000000))"
10 loops, best of 3: 26.6 msec per loop
$ pypy -m timeit "sum(xrange(1000000))"
10 loops, best of 3: 132 msec per loop
$ pypy --version
Python 2.7.1 (?, May 02 2011, 19:05:35)
[PyPy 1.5.0-alpha0 with GCC 4.6.0]
$ python --version
Python 2.7.1
$ python3 --version
Python 3.2