Maybe its just me, but there seems to be a bit of confusion between frameworks and language. Or many its that some languages are now rarely seen out of the frameworks that made them prominent.

Because PHP was built for a web environment and has features that make it quite useful out of the box, for that environment.

With Ruby or Phython you need to do extra work or jump into a framework to get to that "starting point". However, if you are going to start comparing Ruby/Python with a framework to PHP, then you need to look at PHP through one of the prominent frameworks out today (Symphony, ZF, Etc). Otherwise you are comparing apples to oranges.