This is more of an implementation question than a language question. There's nothing stopping some (stoopid) C compiler implementor from also limiting their call stack to 1000. There are a lot of small processors out there that wouldn't have stack space for even that many.
(The Python folks are quick to point out that you can always convert recursive functions to iterative ones and that they're always faster. That's 100% true. It's not really what my question is about though.)
Perhaps they do say that, but this isn't quite correct. Recursion can always be converted to iteration, but sometimes it also requires manual use of a stack too. In those circumstances, I could see the recursive version being faster (assuming you are smart enough to make simple optimizations, like pulling unneeded declarations outside of the recursive routine). After all, the stack pushes surrounding procedure calls are a well bounded problem that your compiler should know how to optimize very well. Manual stack operations, on the other hand, are not going to have specialized optimization code in your compiler, and are liable to have all sorts of user-interface sanity checks that will take up extra cycles.
It may be the case that the iterative/stack solution is always faster in Python. If so, that's a failing of Python, not of recursion.
