Sure, fair point. However, something that is really important about Erlang is that you don't have to do anything special in your request handler, even if you are doing long-running calculations. Since it has its own scheduler, you just write your code, and the runtime takes care of giving it time slices as needs be.
Of course, this doesn't solve the DB issue, but it's still noteworthy.
It's nice to have a fast web server, and I'd choose a fast one over a slow one, but it would be nice if these sort of benchmarks included database access or some other real-world web application property in each request/response loop.