At least internally Rails 3 is a lot less crufty and hackish than Rails 2. If you ever tried writing your own plugins and such to deal with certain internals there is a lot to appreciate about Rails 3.

From a general use perspective, Rails has always been designed with a focus on intuitiveness and trying to eschew unnecessary configuration. Whether it succeeds on both fronts is a matter of opinion, but considering the types of configuration options it provides I think the team has done a pretty good job.

Rails is a pre-built web app architecture. Of course it is always going to be quicker and have less of a learning curve to just throw together your own simple app architecture from scratch. But if the app you're building isn't trivial, in most cases it's going to save you a lot of time (in not reinventing the wheel or getting caught in common pitfalls) to go with the prebuilt time-tested community-supported architecture.

I wouldn't think Rails compares too poorly to the PHP MVC frameworks. Sure if you're building just a simple sort of website with maybe a few forms go with framework-free PHP, but for more complex but somewhat standard web apps if you forgo the framework (for Ruby, PHP, etc.) it is usually a mistake.