Could you elaborate on why it is a pain to deploy? I've never used Meteor but I thought one of the selling points is ease of deploy, hot code pushes, stuff like that.
Never really had an issue - I can't say the same about rails! Obviously Meteor has the advantage of being younger and so less cruft has built up, but I'd bet on it still being insanely easy to deploy 4 years from now.
The Meteor team is doing an awesome job spending the VC money on making an experience that is fantastic for devs. Major props to Geoff et al.
Deployment depends on where you want to run it. Builds into tarballs that can be deployed pretty directly onto EC2 or other hosting services. It does require a VPS or equivalent system (LAMP hosts won't run Meteor). I understand Heroku can be a little more complicated as well. That said, Meteor's self-hosting option is pretty good for getting started, and Amazon instances run it very well.
Also +1 on the Major Props to the Meteor team. They are a model team.
