Yeah, the lack of native non-blocking bindings is quite the issue. There have been some attempts at implementing plain-PHP non-blocking drivers. One of the most impressive I've seen so far is phpdaemon: https://github.com/kakserpom/phpdaemon.
Fun use case: On Chrome latest (22) view the README section with the example gif. Open a new tab, spend a few minutes on it, go back to view the sample gif and it goes into warp drive .
Eric, from Tim and Eric's Awesome show. It's difficult to explain the context due to the nature of the show. Just give it a watch and you'll see what I mean.