It may be a matter of taste, but I always considered this particular feature of == beneficial. In the normal case, it is what you need (in the context that most PHP applications deal with, namely communication over HTTP and with MySQL).

What is shown here is just a rare edge case that you should not normally encounter.

But I think that == has some other behaviors which are really detrimental. Like 0 == 'hallo world'. Sadly those can't be fixed due to backwards compatibility.