When this package was added it was intended as a stopgap measure, really. There was no good PHP API for the memcached daemon. The only good one was the Perl one, (now Cache::Memcache) written by the memcached author.
There was later a PHP API written in C, part of the PECL, which would inherently be faster. It’s now the recommended API (SO USE IT, AND DISTCC! </subtle).
So now the slow, buggy, unsupported API is gone. Rejoice!