Ruby? Viable?

How does Ruby fare in terms of a means to code distributable applications? I'm new to programming and have been working with Python, but something about Ruby attracts me.

Rubygarden says it will have more overhead than C++, but I don't think I'm ready to learn C++, especially working more with Mac/Linux.

Is there any PyObjC-esque extenstion to Ruby?

Ruby has a nicer syntax than Python, but damn it's slow. And no unicode? :(

Also, those regex suck. Matz was bright enough to rip off some ideas from Perl, but mandatory sub/gsub() is !@#$%^ retarded. I want my s///!