Yes, they did have to blanket-ban it to begin with. If they're to make an exception for this, then in the interest of avoiding fragmentation they won't be making an exception for the Ruby language in the abstract; rather they'll be making the exception for the MacRuby implementation in particular. MacRuby is a unique implementation, and programming Cocoa through MacRuby is vastly different (and incompatible) experience from programming Cocoa on other OS X Ruby implementations.
Given that MacRuby is not considered "stable" just yet, the time is not right for Apple to provide an exception to 3.3.1 for Ruby programming. If this does happen, then it will happen only after MacRuby is good and ready.
I emphasize that I do not support Apple's draconian policies toward iOS developers, but their behavior here is internally consistent with the possibility of an eventual allowance for MacRuby.
I don't know about "not considered stable." The official MacRuby site claims the current version is "Stable for Cocoa Development." It's not on the iPhone, granted, but that's because it's banned, so nobody wants to waste time on it.
The MacRuby team reckons it's "stable", in the sense that the API shouldn't change too much in the future and it probably won't crash. But there are good reasons Steve might not yet consider it mature enough for the iPhone. For one thing, gems don't work yet.
Not so. The MacRuby team had already thought up a number of ideas for working around the lack of a garbage collected runtime (the most promising was similar to the direction Apple's going with Objective-C, where retain and release happen automatically based on policies). They never got implemented because Apple instituted the ban on programming languages right around the same time.
Given that MacRuby is not considered "stable" just yet, the time is not right for Apple to provide an exception to 3.3.1 for Ruby programming. If this does happen, then it will happen only after MacRuby is good and ready.
I emphasize that I do not support Apple's draconian policies toward iOS developers, but their behavior here is internally consistent with the possibility of an eventual allowance for MacRuby.