Yes I agree wholeheartedly. There are two very fair knocks against PHP: it's not the fastest, and the API uses somewhat inconsistent standards and conventions (isset vs. is_array for instance...so frustrating). But for the slowness aspect, it's not so slow that you are really hindered by this unless you are doing something that requires very intense performance, in which case why are you using a higher level language anyway. Pretty much the rest of its bad reputation is undeserved, and the downsides are on the level of give and take you get with any other language.
I really understand why people hate PHP so much when all they get to see is purely non-optimized shit. It generally has a really bad reputation which it doesn't deserve. Especially in HN-circles.