You just need to decide how appropriate that is for your situation.
As an industry I suspect we tend to over-engineer rather than under. There is a huge spectrum between my single person business with a brochure site and what Google or Apple needs. I'm willing to bet most programmers are working closer to the first than the second.
Even rsync might not be atomic enough for some situations[1] since it'll update files as it goes rather than in one huge transaction at the end.
[1] I worked on the World Cup 2006 site for Yahoo! and we had this issue - solved with 'rsync --link-dest' and swapping symlinks.