This is going to provoke massive eyerolling over at the Erlang industry.
If they sincerely believe that Erlang offers a superior alternative to Node for what the influx of new Node developers need, then they should be looking to provide resources to help these devs "graduate" to erlang.
Not once have I seen a blog post saying "Like Node.js? Then you're going to love Erlang! Let me show you why it's better, with some snippets to compare and contrast."
Given the fact that there already exist bridges that can take javascript snippets and run them in sub-processes within erlang I am really surprised that no one has bothered to do a "enode" system that just provides a node-like api for the callouts to the javascript processes.
couchdb can only run javascript functions on json objects, and really only to transform those objects into other objects. last i checked, it has no way of interacting with the erlang node it's hosted on.
Shell is not a language optimized for stability. It is optimized for interactive use, above all else - it's not even a very good scripting language, even though it's historically been used that way an awful lot.
Python is not a language optimized for stability - it's not even mentioned in the Zen of Python: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/
The primary focus of Java (at the time of it's creation) was "write once, run anywhere". The primary focus of Java (now) is "languages that compile to JVM bytecode are nifty - plus, we have C-like syntax but are a high-level language".
The primary focus of Erlang, before and above anything else, is program stability. OTP exists to increase stability. "Let it crash" exists to increase stability. Parallelism and message passing are in the language not because they're neat, but because (if they are used at all sensibly) they will increase stability.
Still I cannot see why this is a cultural issue that keeps developers away. Missing things like good string-libs, or ",;." syntax hassles, ok. But stability-features?
The point you address for C is , in a way, also valid for Erlang. It's your program which has to be stable, the language just offer you supervisors and independent processes. "Write it correctly" is the only way to achieve that goal, Erlang does not help you with that. Could be that messing up an OTP behaviour is as easy as dereferencing a null pointer... (disclaimer: I'm no Erlang developer)
One could compare Node.js to Twisted, Tornado or EventMachine. However, comparing Erlang to Node.js is somehow weird as they have different paradigms — Erlang is highly-concurrent with its "green" processes, while Node is single-process single-thread with "asynchronous" paradigm.
(However, there are some aspects, that could be compared. Erlang has "let it crash" motto, while in Node.js one has to be careful with any exceptions. Erlang is distributed and Node.js has no notion of processes.)