That race was over four years ago, though. Ruby won. It's nice that the old nag is finally making it to the finish line, but the audience has been gone for a long time.
Actually, I don't know a lot of Perl developers who have switched to Ruby (though many have tried it--it is, after all, a very comfortable fit for Perl programmers, since it borrowed a lot of the best features of Perl). I know several PHP guys who made the switch...but, there are numerous areas where Ruby shows its immaturity and Perl is far more competent: Unicode, block scope, VM performance, concurrency, library breadth and depth, just to name a few.
I like Ruby and think it's a very fine language. I've implemented a couple of small projects in Ruby, and had fun with it. I find it as readable and writable as any language I've used. But, I'm confident I could accomplish almost any task I would ever need to accomplish faster in Perl, and the result would run faster, smaller, and more reliably. The same is true of Python, though to a lesser degree (though some of the problem features in Python are more uncomfortable for me...closures, in particular), but at least it has some Unicode support built in (or bolted on with reasonable competence), and the VM tends to be closer to the speed of Perl than Ruby.
I wasn't aware Ruby 1.9 existed. I thought the current Ruby version was 1.8.mumble.
Python 3.0 did just spring into existence while we were having this discussion, and it finally has proper Unicode support. So, there's one less reason to choose Perl over Python.
If Ruby has Unicode support in 1.9, and 1.9 were widely available, then I guess that'd be true of Ruby as well. But, I just went to the Ruby website and it looks like 1.8.7 is the Ruby version available. It doesn't have Unicode support, does it?
Strictly, strictly, strictly speaking, you're right: 1.8.7 is the current "production" version of Ruby.
However, Ruby 1.9 has been around for about a year now (considered a "development" release) but Ruby 1.9.1 will become the "production" version of Ruby when it's released in the next month (yeah, I know that makes no sense). The current preview releases are pretty spot on though - so we're in a transitional phase. Ruby 1.9's performance is also somewhat better than that of 1.8.
If we're not strictly speaking about stable, widely available versions, how about we talk about how awesome Perl 6 is? Because it really is astonishingly, mind-bendingly awesome.
Granted, the leading Perl 6 implementation is still a little over a year away (though Parrot hits 1.0 in March, which is a pretty cool milestone in and of itself), and I imagine Ruby 1.9 will be widely available long before then.