I agree. I do a lot of wordpress work, and many of the people doing that have no idea what the command line looks like. I don't fault them for it-- that's just what their jobs/business have so far demanded of them.

And while I have setup VPSs for my own projects and they seem to do okay, I've never had to be responsible for a machine that serves other people, and I don't know if I want to be the only guy who has access to a machine that other people rely on to do their business: there are a world of unknown unknowns there, and if I can offload that liability its probably the wiser move.

Bad generalization. There's plenty of developers in general that know nothing of devops and server setup and maintenance. I put it on par with frontend developers who don't know how to slice up a PSD.

>I think it's because there are lots of PHP programmers who don't have the first clue about setting up an actual server on the internet (and keeping it up).

Well PHP programmers are going to want to use PHP anyways. But as far as users not knowing how to setup a server, that's true. But it is also irrelevant. Tons of people provide tons of different VM images for all sorts of things, node included. At that point it is no harder than PHP, with the added benefit of not needing to upgrade PHP every 2 weeks for the latest round of security holes.