I don't like us having these $phpcmd type commands, for a few reasons:

1) It's easy to forget to use them in a script.. so first you write $phpcmd, then later on you use php and then you can end up accidentally using two different versions of php if the command is working as expected
2) It increases the pain of testing - I mean that you have to define all these environment variables when testing locally. In fact, in the actual unit tests take the lazy option
3) We can just set $PATH for this!
4) We have another option for achieving similar functionality with $extrapath to achieve that too