In this new post to his blog Padraic Brady looks at why models are "misunderstood and unappreciated" in a Model/View/Controller sort of world.

By the time I'd finished both chapters [of my Zend Framework book] I realised I had spent a lot of space explaining the Model, most of it discussing how the Zend Framework does not actually give you one. In fact, no web application framework offers a complete Model (for reasons I'll explain later). However nearly all frameworks manage to avoid making that perfectly obvious. Instead they continually link the concept of a Model to the related, but not identical, concept of data access. This is quite misleading.

He looks at two things models are good for (maintaining state and enforcing rules on the data in the current state), how it seems most PHP developers perceive them, how controllers can be turned into "mutated models" and the idea that models should be classes and controllers are just processes (handlers for requests).