The funny thing is that if you do care about nginx and fastcgi you can get blazing fast high-volume/low-overhead php hosting with varnish + nginx + php_fpm.
Right, most people who decide to use PHP aren't overly concerned about performance. And the folks who are concerned about it tend to choose other solutions (say, node.js, for example). The funny part is that it's fairly easy to take even bloated PHP apps like wordpress and turn them into high performance sites on very modest hardware.