Nginx configuration is about as powerful as Apache, and personally easier for me to grok, but you have to be able to get past the lack of documentation.
Here's the configuration file from my new project -- with the domain name removed. I've marked the magic bits that gets you Wordpress pretty URL compatibility. If you're actually asking about more complicated rewrites, those are all possible too -- look at the Nginx rewrite module docs.
That's a much more attractive configuration file than an Apache one.
I see that you're using FastCGI. Something I didn't mention was that I attempted to use FastCGI, but gave up because my memory usage kept snowballing until I had to reboot my server over and over again. I don't know for sure whether it would have made things any faster.
Here's the simplest way I've found how to do it. There is also a snippet of Nginx config floating out there for enabling SuperCache (and I assume Total Cache would be easy to implement too). I am able to run 8 FastCGI processes + nginx + MySQL (with InnoDB) on a 256MB VPS, but YMMV. Overall, nginx is awesome.
Here's the configuration file from my new project -- with the domain name removed. I've marked the magic bits that gets you Wordpress pretty URL compatibility. If you're actually asking about more complicated rewrites, those are all possible too -- look at the Nginx rewrite module docs.
http://www.pastie.org/929223