What do you say?
I ended up catching on fairly quickly and I was able to help out other students, but when I tried installing it on my laptop at home on a Windows computer, I had to eventually bite the bullet and reformat my hard drive to get it working.
Installing node.js was so easy, and since I do a lot of front-end work in javascript already, I already knew the syntax, I just had to learn how the node.js functions work.
I've never heard of pusher, but I tried out socket.io and it was really easy to implement.
I also saw that node.js is getting some huge support from big companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. To me, it seems like 10 years down the line there's still going to be support for it in some way, shape or form, so I also based my decision on that as well. I can't honestly say the same about RoR, but I also haven't researched it as much.
That said, they're both really fun to work with.