Cool, I haven't heard of this before; I will think about it. Presumably, an exception would be 'view' type objects in an MVC setup?
I haven't done any RoR but I imagine a similar approach would work there.
If there's an on/off button to show additional information on the screen, it would seem weird to me to have the button (view) try and display the additional settings. The view has no idea what kind of environment it is in, how does it know if it can display the information without moving other things around. But a controller object managing all the views on the screen does. This also avoids subclassing or adding methods to the view.