For smaller projects, sure, this is great. The moment you need to test your site with the the Apache rewrite_module or another web servers flavor of it is the moment this becomes useless.
Yeah but if you need that functionality you can take the hour to set up a localhost install of apache with whatever stuff you need. This is for rapid debugging and people just learning.
I am a huge fan of XAMPP/LAMP for exactly this reason!
Exactly, and I like built in servers because it's easy to start messing with stuff until I find I need something bigger (and I often don't until it's time to actually think about deploying stuff). I can't even think of the number of times I had an idea, started installing a server to work on and stopped halfway through.