<p>For development, I use a local LAMP stack, for production I'm using <a href="http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/django.html" rel="noreferrer">MediaTemple's Django Container</a> (which I'm loving BTW).  MT's container uses lighthttpd.  Honestly I've never had any other experience with it. I've always used Apache. I've been doing some reading:</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/04/05/the-lighttpd-web-server.html" rel="noreferrer">Onlamp</a></li>
<li><a href="http://weblog.textdrive.com/article/25/should-i-consider-lighttpd" rel="noreferrer">TextDrive</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.linux.com/feature/51673" rel="noreferrer">Linux.com</a></li>
</ul>

<p>Here's are questions:</p>

<ul>
<li>What strengths does one have over the other?</li>
<li>Would it <em>benefit</em> me to use lighthttpd on my dev setup?</li>
<li>What's up with using both?  The Linux.com article talks about using lighttpd <em>with</em> Apache.</li>
</ul>

The benefit of both: Apache is more powerful and extensible (useless if you don't need that power, but anyway...) and lighttpd is faster at static content. The idea is of splitting your site into static content (css, js, images, etc) and dynamic code that flows through Apache.
I'm not saying you can't do a lot with lighttpd on its own. You can and people do.
If you're using lighttpd exclusively on your production server, I would seriously consider mirroring that on your development and staging servers so you know exactly what to expect before you deploy.