Kinda, but no. You can do simple things quickly with Rails. That means you get to the harder things faster. You very quickly discover that you have to learn Ruby if you want to do anything beyond scaffolding. I think that's what he means by being a "productive" Rails programmer.

But a person who has done Rails development for 6-9 months, ad has used Git, and knows how to deploy an application to Heroku... they will really be able to do a lot of cool things very quickly. Just watch what happens in October during the Rails Rumble.

No. Rails is only quick to learn if you are already a web developer who happens to be using another language or framework.