I actually agree with you. It's been a while since I used PHP much, but the last time I did some work in, erm, I think it was Symfony, I remember thinking that PHP was pretty nice for the template layer. That may partly be because I'd got used to Django, which had an aggressively simplistic template layer at the time.

Edit: By which I mean, Symfony improves things by working around PHP's suboptimal default.