Is http.createServer robust enough for production?
It is my understanding that running it as is in production is not a good idea. You want to at least configure nginx between node and the world. If that's the case, doesn't that undermine the whole "focus on your application, not the configuration" point he's making? Sure you can call startServer multiple times, but then you would still have to focus on configuration.
It really comes down to tradeoffs. If your primary concern is the most simultaneous connections, then you'll need to find a special tool, and Node or most other non-haskell web frameworks probably aren't for you.
Node makes it really easy to do some things. That focus makes some other things more complicated than they should be (because it's asynchronous, you end up needing to deal with flow control, often times using queues that mitigate some of the asynchronous advantages). It's like everything else with computers. There's tradeoffs. http.createServer can be used when it can be used (which happens to cover most use cases).
This only addresses servers that you expose to the world though - I think one of the less publicised strengths of making creating servers easy is that it allows you to make internal servers for services trivially.
And using a service oriented architecture is a great win.
sudo iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080
However, if you're using HTTP virtual servers and you already use nginx, sure, place node behind it.