That's interesting, but if you start type annotating the code, then you lose a large part of what makes Ruby attractive to a lot of people.
But even if it did: Rubyists are far more likely to be tolerant about documenting type information in optional comments than including them in the code.
I think there's room for experimenting with Ruby's typing, but I also think the most that project can hope to achieve would be extensions that could see some limited use in the odd little piece of performance critical code. It's best hope of success, actually, would be that JRuby and other alternative implementations grow more popular and make it harder for people to rely on C-extensions.