One other big thing to point out is that this approach has the biggest pay-off when you're doing API-focused development (eg writing RESTful web services for thick client applications to use, which was where the framework originated from).
While you could do more traditional web apps this way too, I haven't really tried to optimise for that use case at present. It would need more rails-style glue code and help for HTML templating etc to get there, although that's certainly doable.
I've also been waiting to see if the new more flexible Rails makes it possible to switch in the resource-based routing and controller approach that I want. Sadly I suspect there wouldn't be much of Rails left by that point (we're not using ActiveRecord either), but bears investigation.
While you could do more traditional web apps this way too, I haven't really tried to optimise for that use case at present. It would need more rails-style glue code and help for HTML templating etc to get there, although that's certainly doable.
I've also been waiting to see if the new more flexible Rails makes it possible to switch in the resource-based routing and controller approach that I want. Sadly I suspect there wouldn't be much of Rails left by that point (we're not using ActiveRecord either), but bears investigation.