I agree - cPanel is the greatest web hosting management system available and is why i try to find it whenever i switch hosting. What i particularly love about it (and other systems like cPanel) is the ability to do things like password protect directories so that we don't have to manually create all the necessary files for this to happen manually.

Some good free solutions are CubePanel and the Apache Tomkat is also good except i don't think that it does quite the same things to the extent of cPanel. Go cPanel!