Also it's worth noting that if you do want to do PHP "right" and use a framework like Zend or Cake you will probably still be shopping around a bit because you're not going to get the ability to use those frameworks out of the box on most hosting providers.
I've not really found this to be the case with Cake (which I like and use a fair bit) ... even if .htaccess is disabled for some reason, there is an alternate way to get it to run just fine ... generally though ... I can just put my cake file folder on the server and its good to go.
Also it's worth noting that if you do want to do PHP "right" and use a framework like Zend or Cake you will probably still be shopping around a bit because you're not going to get the ability to use those frameworks out of the box on most hosting providers.