I chose 1 million dollars as a small number that should be possible to raise if we have a good enough proposal.  The top three voted projects focus on, one way or another, performance and applicability.  The winning project essentially was to improve Python's concurrency storing markedly.  Basically spend the money on hiring people to really pound on multi-processing and maybe even fine-grained locking (concurrent threading) in CPython to produce far better coarse-grained concurrency support.  We'd have to see who would be interested in funding this type of research... we saw concurrency as a problem with the current CPython implementation (though there was the hint that it's a problem of perception, rather than necessarily a practical problem).

The pan-mobile SDK project was more of an immediate-term goal, but it requires significant compiler technology and a lot of hard work in order to produce a commercial-quality resulting platform/SDK.  There was some question as to whether $1 million would be enough to produce the requisite quality, but as it's a commercial project, the $1 million could be seed money and you might be able to draw handset manufacturers in to further funding.  The project seems very doable, it's just a question of money, time, vision and effort.

The idea of fine-grained concurrency (e.g. spreading for loops across processors automatically if you can prove there's no dependencies in the loop code) was seen more as a PyPy project, as was the addition of explicit asynchronous operation syntax. We spent a while discussing what would be needed for each project, and the idea that PyPy would make the mobile-targeting SDK easier, and that concurrency/performance issues would be best worked out in PyPy came up a number of times. Effectively, while we had proposals that said "Python should be", we didn't get a lot of support for the idea of using CPython as the platform for figuring out how to do those things beyond minor changes to the current approaches.

PyPy development was, by our rough estimates, 10 person-years from being a robust platform for widespread real-world development, that's cutting it close for a mere 1 million dollars, but maybe if we partnered with other people who would have a stake in the result.  Performance improvements, concurrency primitives and back-ends targeting mobile-type platforms were all identified as areas that would make sense to focus energy.  Realistically, though, the core PyPy tool chain probably needs to be the first focus and then we can look at the extras.