What's the deal with Ruby?

I read a lot of testing blogs. TestingReflections aggregates a lot of these. I've been seeing a lot of talk about Ruby. By itself, I probably wouldn't take much notice, but I've often seen it associated with testers writing code (or script), which is something I think is extremely important for testers to be able to do. I finally started to do a little reading on it. As a big fan of Pragmatic Programming, I believe in learning a new programming language every year (or two), and thought that given its apparent growing popularity, Ruby would make a good choice. I read through the docs and looked at some samples.

I don't get the excitement.

Sure, it's object oriented, sure it's powerful and (somewhat) simple. But c# is all of those things as well. Plus there are zillions* more samples of c# code. I didn't see it spelled out as such in the docs I read, but the big win for Ruby is that it's multi platform enabled (and portable to new platforms). I have no way of knowing the os demographic for ruby users, but as far as I can see, the only way it would be compelling is non microsoft platforms. I realize as I write this that this sounds very narrow minded - my only confusion is regarding how someone writing automation only for windows platforms would find Ruby compelling (ok - windows platforms with .net framework installed - I may have answered my own question).

*yes, I made up this stat