I would say that there are real technical issues behind it. The Ruby implementation (at least ruby 1.8) is not designed for concurrency : ruby 1.8 has a global interpretor lock, and it uses green threads instead of OS native threads.

So, for a web application to scale, you have to run multiple ruby interpretors, and make them work together.

Note : I am not into web development, and It's been a long time I haven't used ruby. Maybe ruby 1.9 or JRuby don't have these issues. Maybe the global lock is not a real problem for scaling up.