I guess I'll chip in here.
The handful of advantages that make PHP popular are also some of its worst liabilities. Yes, you can deploy with just FTP... but then you have upload security to worry about, and have to protect all your library files, and yadda yadda. Yes, you can do SQL right off the bat... but you have to take care of SQL injection yourself. Yes, you can stick your code right in your HTML... as hard to read as that may be. Yes, there's no resource leakage... but every request has to recompile the code and reconnect to your database.
None of these things are problems at first, but they become problems quickly once your software expands beyond two pages or a hundred hits a day. Some of them may not even be obvious problems, but you'll pay the cost anyway when some kid steals your database.
Other platforms, meanwhile, tend to have fairly simple solutions to all of these problems, for the price of a minor increase in upfront learning. But since the problems are all things that happen later on, newcomers will just see that language X is harder.
This poses something of a difficulty. How can other languages introduce the ease of PHP that everyone's demanding? We can't just port exactly the same features over, or we'll have exactly the same problems. mod_python was a bad enough idea that it's dead now. Heroku is a neat thing, but still requires writing configuration files, and nobody enjoys doing that. Nothing is really well-suited for single-page fire-and-forget, either.
I have been thinking about this since writing that damned fractal post, but I'm not clever enough to have thought up a solution yet. So, you know, it would be useful if we could brainstorm on how to fix the learning curve and deployment instead of "just turn everything else into PHP!"