As for PHP 5, I still think it is beta quality. Not only based on bug fixes, but the fact that several key items in PECL and PEAR are still not functioning with PHP 5. This is a real show stopper in any production environment. If you really need this stuff, it is easy enough to just run everything ~x86 for a testing server. But for production? Only if you like things to be broken all the time. The PHP folks need to first figure out how to fix problems running with Apache 2 before running their mouths about how stable php5 is, but that's another rant all together.
I'll agree that PHP5 is certainly *not* production-ready, and if you're looking for PHP5 packaged and ready for installation on its day of release, neither FreeBSD nor Gentoo will fit the bill. Both have strong quality-control standards that must be met before new packages make it into arch-stable. Any competent admin should have their own quality-control standards which must be met before they put new software in production, as well. Sure, Microsoft software's very cutting edge, but a fat lot of good that does me if I have to reboot the damn machine every few hours.
I'll also quickly point out that PHP's problems w/ Apache 2 are not strictly PHP's problems -- many of the libraries it links against are not thread-safe. In particular and most prevalent are the MySQL client libraries. This makes running PHP w/ Apache 2 in threading mode (the default under Windows) troublesome. However, PHP works great w/ Apache 2 if you run Apache 2 in forking mode since you don't have to worry about any of PHP's dependent libraries' thread-safety issues.
