been checking some simple game development solutions in my spare time ... been looking into SlimDX, and then discovered pygame - http://www.pygame.org, works on linux and windows, it's a Python based lib, now i dunno python but it was really easy to start crating nice stuff in no time.
Pygame is a great way to get started quickly. Once you move into the 3d world, though, I seriously recommend pyogre (and its bindings for Bullet and all that). You won't get the knowledge of how to write your own engine, but if you want to do some awesome gamedev with minimal time sunk, you really can't beat pyogre, IMO.
I have looked at Panda3D, but I haven't built anything with it, so I really can't compare the two very well. That said, Panda3D's goal is to be a game engine, rather than just a graphics engine, as with Ogre. I imagine between that and the poor documentation for pyogre, it may very well be easier to get a game going with Panda3D. But personally, I love ogre and the bindings that pyogre provides to other libraries, e.g. Bullet, make my life damn easy. Also, the documentation issue is an issue, but most things are wrapped so closely to the C++ counterpart that you can just use the Ogre docs and be fine.
I spent a couple days writing wrappers around pyogre to do things like game state management, nice GUI APIs, etc, and after that it was clear sailing. I wish I had more time to work on the game all that stuff was for, really, but such is life.
