"PHP is stupidly simple to deploy compared to most other technologies" That's true, but it stops mattering for more complex sites where you want easy rollbacks to previous versions if a deploy went awry, separate static media serving (because it's faster), load balancing and the like.
Nobody will dispute that PHP has by far the best deployment story if you need to quickstart something (see http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/01/12/what-php-deployment-ge...). But for an application of any complexity, really, you'll have more important stuff to worry about.
easy rollbacks to previous versions if a deploy went awry, separate static media serving (because it's faster), load balancing and the like
Other things that come to mind are database migrations, running tests before deployment, pushing code to multiple servers etc.
It is probably a good idea to automate all these tasks.
Yes, with an application server you might have to reload the code, but it doesn't really matter, because thats just one step of your automated deployment.
And if you use an opcode cache you probably have to restart the server with PHP anyway.
Nobody will dispute that PHP has by far the best deployment story if you need to quickstart something (see http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/01/12/what-php-deployment-ge...). But for an application of any complexity, really, you'll have more important stuff to worry about.