I'd argue a little with the "Apache is monolithic". If you know your elbow from your butt, you can make a decent Apache setup as any decent sysadmin should do. The thing that I hate the most in nginx is the lack of DSO modules. When I need a new module, I need a new nginx build. nginx itself has more than you ask for in a standard build. As example, I counted the "with" and "without" flags from out nginx package build script. It has 3 "with" flags (SSL, gzip static, PCRE JIT) vs 14 "without" flags. And we can part with gzip static since most of the static objects are pushed by CDN's now.

Apache is catching up with its evented MPM and proxy support, but I still wouldn't go back to Apache though. The main selling point that the OP should get is the fact that evented servers have much better memory usage under the same load as the threaded servers or (cough) process based servers.