It's always interesting to see differences in people's 'base' stacks. Where feasible I like to have the environment on my dev machine reflect production as closely as possible so I would go with Passenger over Pow, but this is a great little guide.
That's what I use Vagrant for: attempting to mimic production machines as close as possible. But that only happens as I'm testing before a release. Otherwise I use the easiest / best tool for the OS and machine that I'm developing on.
