OK I'll bite

"This in my view is also why Symfony is much more widespread as a php framework than Zend."

FUD. Symfony and ZendFramework are two very different things. Symfony is an ORM. ZendFramework is pretty much everything else. Oh and it costs a grand total of NZ$0. And its BSD licensed, so the Free's got you coming and going :-)

"Yes, well, Ubuntu might see that sometime in Q4 2012. They still have 6.01 in their repos, You have to download the sun package if you want 6.1 and it looks like Intrepid will still provide 6.01."

Yup. Same as Eclipse... Just try combinig a repo install with Eclipse plugins

Back on topic,,,

I've just given a NetBeans a whirl and as a long time Eclipse/PDT user I must say I'm well impressed. 20M download comes with everything needed, including a working Mercurial plugin and basic database support. Compared to a120M PDT download and fussing around with DB, Javascript and mercurial plugins... And for some reason it seems to be snappier than equivalently loaded Eclipse.