"Easy to deploy" and "Many cheap webhosts are already configured for it" are still very different things. I never found it helpful to conflate them. For example, a VPS with CPanel/Plesk is quite the dependency. As is "a cheap PHP webhost with servers configured for your PHP scripts".
I look at it this way: PHP apps are so easy to deploy, it's a commodity. I run my own dev servers then move them to VPSes, billed to the client, for deployment.
