The gobject system that underlies Vala is a language agnostic mechanism. Vala also produces gobject introspection information, so bindings can be automatically generated for many languages, including Python and Ruby. Obviously, that doesn't solve the problem of Vala being a barrier to entry for developers wanting to work on Elementary's core apps.

(I once offended some Dutch friends of mine by calling Dutch "German with a Geordie accent," although when you get down to it, "German with a Geordie accent" pretty much describes English, too.)