There are actually quite a few github users who have ported the project to Go, Ruby, Python, etc. I believe there already exists a popular java based alternative.
Node would be awesome for a project like this. Especially with Gulp. If someone hasn't already built it, I would love to.
Node would be overkill for a project like this, though. It's a lot to install, manage, compile, etc. just for a simple, relatively static dashboard that just collects basic stats, especially if your package manager doesn't have v8 and node in its repos.
I feel as though the great thing about this project is its drop-in-ness (which is difficult to provide without PHP) and its flexibility; for example, I can put this on a server behind Apache, running PHP, and set up LDAP authentication to restrict access to it. With Node, that's a huge amount more work for little to no gain (since I would probably just put it behind Apache anyway).
Just my two cents, but as much as I find PHP distasteful, it really does feel like the best tool for the niche the tool currently serves.
A simple Python version that could serve out JSON data and a nice frontend that could collect and display it all (in groups) would be a nice way of having essentially a live munin graph. That would be cool.
Node would be awesome for a project like this. Especially with Gulp. If someone hasn't already built it, I would love to.