[theamk]

does not seem so... Something as simple as "yaml" already requires reaching to apt-get: http://bd808.com/pecl-file_formats-yaml/

> Php-yaml can be installed using PHP's PECL package manager. This extension requires the LibYAML C library version 0.1.0 or higher to be installed.

    $ sudo apt-get install libyaml-dev

This is basically how "pip" works, and while it's fine for basic stuff, it gets pretty bad if you want to install fancy numerical of cryptography package on a LTS linux system that's at the end of the support period.

I am guessing that PHP might simply have less need for native packages, being more web-oriented.