Let me put it this way: Lisp hackers think that one of the major problems with Emacs Lisp is that it basically uses one big namespace for everything, forcing awkward naming conventions and contortions to avoid collisions. That is possibly the one part of any Lisp that works like PHP ... and the Lisp community pretty much universally agrees that it's a bad idea, not because it's like PHP, but because it's a bad idea.
Of course one big namespace is a bad idea and everybody knows it. I'm not sure why that's relevant here. Namespaces was always the #1 requested feature for PHP.
PHP does things differently; you don't import things before you use them -- PHP loads modules/classes as necessary when they're used. If you don't use a class, it's not loaded.
Other features of PHP make things like "import *" impossible (or at least very expensive) but at the same time it's also much less necessary.
Also you should check out what Alan Storm has to say about this: http://alanstorm.com/python_imports_for_php_developers
Mr. Storm is a crackerjack PHP developer: perhaps you will listen to him.