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My previous example exposed a case in which it is better to do low-level stuff inside Singular/GAP/Magma/... sub-processes.

I guess I also owe you an example that shows how much faster Python and Cython are. Consider an almost empty loop:

sage: singular.eval('int i')
'int i;'
sage: singular.eval('int j')
'int j;'
sage: def test1():
....:     singular.eval('for (i=1;i<=100000;i++){j=i;}')
....:     
sage: def test2():
....:     for i in range(1,100001):
....:         j = i
....:         
sage: def test3():
....:     for i in xrange(1,100001):
....:         j = i
....:         
sage: cython("""
....: def test4():
....:     cdef int i
....:     cdef int j
....:     for i from 1<=i<=100000:
....:         j = i
....: """)
sage: %timeit test1()
5 loops, best of 3: 445 ms per loop
sage: %timeit test2()
125 loops, best of 3: 4.74 ms per loop
sage: %timeit test3()
125 loops, best of 3: 3.27 ms per loop
sage: %timeit test4()
625 loops, best of 3: 126 ns per loop

You see, if such basic things are concerned, Python is much faster than Singular (I don't know how fast GAP is), and Cython much faster than Python.