You're right. Settings are not even necessary in my example, as we should be fine with defaults in most cases. The only lines you really need are these four:

  from django.conf import settings
  settings.configure(ROOT_URLCONF='polls')
  from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
  application = get_wsgi_application()

You lose some of the Django niceties (like being able to provide your own custom settings on the command-line) but flask doesn't have them anyway.

>And the settings aren't even necessary.

Until they are. Then you go ahead and implement an ad-hoc settings scheme.