Well, here's one example for you where rowlevel locking is needed. In fact, when our forum had 1000 visitors at once, rowlevel locking was already needed, because the posting went that fast that there were too many table locks. Which often caused an avalanche effect, making the site effectively inaccessable.
InnoDB solved that.
And we're happy too, now that we have 4000+ visitors at a given time, but that innodb vs myisam is another discussion
The thing is, the total amount of posts and total amount of members are already cached and in that page, it's only meant for a statistics. xx cached posts vs xx total amount of posts. Unless the percentage had 100 decimals, or the board only has 100 posts, it won't matter much what the percentage is. Why not just use the cached value?
It's only a tip for a better user experience, as I'll be editing it for myself anyway.
Oh, and you're better off doing a select count(primary_id) than a select count(*) if it's really needed. Effect might me marginal, but every little thing helps