* Rails is driven/maintained by really high quality developers who adhere to best practices
* The project is well-organized, opinionated and focused, developers tend to follow the one right way of doing things.
* The Rails Ecosystem of gems and plugins has whole gamut of solutions to various engineering problems. These gems vary from excellent to horrible, with the excellent ones floating to the top and become standard for use.
* Rails encompasses best practices that were learned from years of making mistakes with PHP and Java development. It is that much more evolved as a result.
In general, I would say the main difference is Rails seems more top down in the direction of ideas and best practices. People tend to mold themselves and their code to fit with the best practices displayed by core or by seasoned Ruby developers.
PHP on the other hand seems more like a free for all, with little top down influence at all.