Ruby's string concatenation syntax is borrowed from C, and it's a major win: it allows you to spread a single string onto multiple lines without backslash-quoting all the newlines.
This has got to be one of the worst pieces of gushing fanboy-ism I've run into lately. "Look how cool Ruby is, because you can do these crazy, unreadable, unmaintainable things. I don't know why you'd want to do them, but isn't it awesome that you can? Of course, us Ruby programmers are so smart that we would never actually use any of this hard-to-understand stuff, unlike those silly Perl programmers."
I'm not a huge fan of flexible syntaxes, which might be just a bunch of language engineers revolting against periods, semicolons and parentheses. I happen to like my code to be easily readable and I'm willing to give up the time lost in typing a few extra keystrokes for that benefit.