I reported this a while ago and suggested to have the number of pending accepts reported with the event to save that last syscall.
I created an ab replacement based on kevent, and at least with my machines, which are comparable to each other, the load on client dropped from 100% to 2% or something. ab just doesn't give meaningful results (if the client is not way more powerful). With that new client I get very similar results for epoll and kevent, from 1000 through to 26000 concurrent requests, the results have been posted on kevent-homepage in october, I just checked it with new version, but there's no significant difference.
this is the benchmark with kevent-based client:
http://tservice.net.ru/~s0mbre/blog/2006/10/11#2006_10_11
btw, each result is average over 1,000,000 requests
and just for comparison, this is on the same machines using ab:
http://tservice.net.ru/~s0mbre/blog/2006/10/08#2006_10_08