Without starting a flame war here, may I ask if there are Monks who have used both svnserve and Apache and can cite strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches?

Apache/DAV gives you a web browser view of the HEAD of your repo out of the box, allows you to use Apache based access controls to control read/write access to the repo, and allows you to mount the repository as a DAV volume on most OSes. svnserve allows you to leverage off any existing ssh access infrastructure you already have to the development box. Apache might be easier to get through a firewall since it's running over http(s).

There is really not a lot of difference. I'd let your admin dude pick whatever would be most appropriate to your current set up. I've used both in different places and never really noticed either option making things significantly better/worse.

Oh - and look at SVK once you've moved to subversion. Even if you don't use many of its distributed features it makes an excellent command line client.