To be fair, that and being faster than both nginx and lighthttpd. I don't know anything about it but to say its only claim to fame is the web admin isn't quite accurate.
if you work for a company where writing extensions to the server is common-place, i would say the code quality of cherokee is a strong feature as well.
My experience is that Cherokee is a pet httpd for a few devout newbs who find Apache to heavy on Windows XP, and pretty much nothing else.
Saying it's faster than nginx is a big claim, and I would like to see its proxying, load-balancing, URL rewriting, and big file serving performance. For starters.
