Node is doing it differently, and it has advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is if you are doing CPU bound work, you will have to consider how you design your app more carefully. But that's the case with any language or platform.

Event driven servers have been around since the dawn of the internet and the select() call. Node has simply made it easier to write them in a higher level language. I personally think the event model makes a lot of sense for writing network servers, which web servers are. Also having a high performance HTTP implementation built into a platform for building applications for the web is a significant benefit.

I think two prevalent models are going to emerge for writing concurrent servers in the future. Event driven platforms like Node and actor/messaging passing systems like Go and Erlang. The languages and platforms that do not do those things well, I believe, will become less popular.