According to Daniel Käsmayr:
It seems to me a bit odd that Unicode characters are not universally supported ruby most of the time - I would have expected nothing less from ruby, at least ;)
This is one of the main gripes people have with Ruby, it is difficult to admit that a language written by a Japanese guy not to be i18n/m17n aware.
I even heard people saying they'd stick with python for that reason.
Matz has some good reasons but it is still difficult :(