How so? I'm willing to accept that I'm wrong if you can show any server log analytics package that is capable of that. It doesn't seem possible.

Some stuff, but if you want to emulate GA events you'll have to also implement some additional frontend code and a backend to log those events. I hope this is the direction that we see analytics moving. The information analytics provides developers is great, but I don't like the fact that this information is usually given to multiple third parties by using their analytics engines.

No they're not. As an example, bounces are commonly the last page where the user left without doing anything. How can you tell that from a simple server log line that says the page loaded? You cant see if they clicked on something or how long they read the page or what other actions they took.

Most sites today also go far beyond basic pageviews and track all kinds of events on the page like scrolling rates, reading time, what other headlines you clicked or hovered over, etc. This is not possible without JS tracking.