Several of the comments here point out that part of the reason Apache gets a bad rep is that PHP forces it to use the process based mpm, which is bad. Does this mean that it would make more sense to use mod_fastcgi+php-fpm than mod_php? If so, why isn't that being done?
And those would be the "factory" defaults. Distributions can still put in their own defaults, e.g. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS supplies httpd-2.2.x with the worker MPM.
Anyway, Apache 1.3.x (built-in with something similar to the prefork MPM) + mod_php was the de facto (or only?) way to deploy PHP scripts, as you can just throw the scripts into the htdocs directory and they will just work.
I was forced to do this to run mod_spdy. Now the webserver can serve all of the script/css files from the front page simultaneously, which is a huge win for load times.