just curious - does an index.php (dynamic page) have a harder time getting a high PR then say, a static index.html page would that is manually updated now and again?

Depends...
are you talking www.*******.com/index.php
or www.*********.com/pages.php?id=879.98

Google is very good about spidering these days.

As for the com/index.html or com/index.php question:
It doesn't matter at all.

All my pages are .jsp, and as you can see they get spidered and indexed very nicely.