I think he means sad in the sense that this should not be in application code. It should be in PHP interpreter. Fixing the interpreter in application code. Sad.

Sad is definitely overkill here, especially for such a short snippet, but personally I prefer avoiding nested conditionals and else statements in general. Here's a fork that keeps conditional clauses to one line, and I personally find much more readable - https://gist.github.com/3029246

(disclaimer- not tested at all)

In the same sense as code that uses call_user_func_array is dirty looking. It's cruft that has nothing to do with application logic. It'd be nice to be able to do away with these things.