A 2.0 release seems like a big deal; is there a rails practitioner around who could describe the magnitude of these changes to those of us who don't use rails?
I don't do a lot of AJAXy stuff, and I don't talk very frequently to clients that aren't standard browswers. If I did, I think I would have a lot more to gain from this release.
As for the questions about the lack of "scalability" improvements, I don't really care. Its not needed for what I use it for anyway (and probably the same for most people).
Between this and Ruby 1.9 there's some fun new stuff for RoR folks to play with.
The 2.0 release may be coming in close with the upcoming Ruby 2.0 release, which will be highly disruptive (YARV bytecode backend), though I'm not sure if Rails 2.0 will work fine without any changes in Ruby 2.0. Besides, I'm not really sure when Ruby 2.0 is coming out.