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If GUI applications are written properly, they don't need to
hang when they are doing "real work".  The applications you
are using which seem to hang are doing so not because Python
"doesn't have preemptive threads", they are doing so because
the writers of those GUI applications have no idea how to
either 1. write their programs asynchronously via generators
or callbacks or 2. use threads to do the actual work which
post GUI update events.  Talk to the writers of those
applications to get them fixed.

Note that regardless of Python's lack of preemptive
multithreading, thread context switches happen at a regular
rate, discoverable via sys.getcheckinterval(), and setable
via sys.setcheckinterval().