When I said "I still miss the ability to handle dates in the back end in queries though." I meant what Adrian has summed up nicely here:
So in conclusion, timestamps only become a problem for me when working with intervals, and then only when the intervals are not a constant amount of seconds (ie: x months or even years if you consider leap years). I am pretty sure that's enough of an edge case to let it slide, but there might be other benefits to using date types that i don't know about.
The ability to do the range/interval check in the database is nicer than retrieving the whole data set in PHP and filtering it there. However, as he said: MySQL and PostrgreSQL do it with different syntax, so there is no straight forward solution to this.