But you're going to have to run some sort of extra server, be it Apache, Gunicorn, or uWSGI. Nginx does not run any apps, that is why it is so fast, it takes requests and either returns file system objects or routes requests to other processes. The tutorial above uses Nginx and uWSGI to handle the Django app. It starts out showing you how to use it with virtualenv, then shows how to run the app without virtualenv.
If you're running more than one app on a site, you might want to learn how to use virtualenv. This can save lots of time and headaches in the future when you decide you want to upgrade one of your apps to a newer version of python or some other module. Otherwise, upgrading anything on the system globally will break all your apps that depend on a specific version of software. And virtualenv is not that mysterious, all it really does is put all of your application's dependencies into a directory and modify any system paths and environment variables to point to that directory. It makes it easy to test and deploy your application to any server.