Yes, fortran is actually faster than C for some things. OK, C++ with the right templates, or a later C standard can theoretically do what Fortran does (remind me again - pass by reference, no recursion, and bounded arrays rather than pointers?). And Intel tends to be faster than gcc.

There's no way you can make broad statements (like "nothing will beat C" or "fortran is actually faster than C for numerical stuff") without having a few exceptions. Actually, Pypy is faster than C, in extremely specific circumstances (i.e. ones which were set up by the Pypy people to show off, see "PyPy faster than C on a carefully crafted example" ... thought they point out there are things you could do in C to make it win).

The most bang for you buck in JITs is for dynamic languages, because while stuff like type inference can exponentially explode, you'll only really have 1 type in many cases (i.e. a float), and the JIT can pick that up. And getting Python within an order of magnitude of C would be a massive win.