Meta-programming is big. You don't realize how much time you spend maintaining unnecessary code until you go down the path of meta-programming. You're letting the code do more work for you.
Behavior Driven-Development. In some languages, writing tests is painful, feels like punishment. Ruby makes testing so much easier, so it's easier to develop applications tests first, easier to refactor the code, since you have tests that can tell you when something goes wrong. It's easier to keep the code clean and without smell. And the next step, writing the design of the application, the behavior, as part of the application itself.
Duck typing, in fact the whole approach to OO, means my Ruby code has very shallow class hierarchy, and less classes than the Java equivalent, which by itself gets rid of a lot of complexity.
Scripting. I'm surprised every time I see people clicking through menus, upload wizards, admin panels to deploy a new version of the application. Can't you just automate it with a simple script? Not all scripting languages are actually good for automating your workload, though. You can do a lot of that with Ruby, not so much with JavaScript.