Rust wasn't created to make programming for parallel execution "easier". What Rust does is make writing implicitly unsafe parrellel code impossible to write.
This is a good thing, but is orthogonal to single threaded performance (which from what I've read, the Rust team definitely cares about).
It's absolutely intended to make it easier. Easier in the sense for example, that you can create a multithreaded program that uses stack-allocated but shared data, and you don't have to debug complex synchronization yourself.
Rayon, being a multithreading library, is of course itself not so trivial to write. What it lives up to is that users of rayon can use the regular rust type system rules to ensure that their use of rayon is thread safe if it compiles.
I find rust is still a complex language. I don't find concurrency to be any easier to write using Rust over using the C++11 concurrency API, for example. I don't have much real experience with concurrent Rust applications, though.
What Rust does have is that once your code compiles in safe mode you're very confident.
Overall, I like the complexity and I have been enjoying my time with Rust. I began using for bare metal ARM programming. After using Rust in "no standard library mode", I'm now convinced there are no more valid reasons for using C in this century. To me, Rust is a no-brainier replacement C.
It's not however,
going to effect the adoption of modern C++, which has a slightly higher level niche in performance critical applications. It's the libraries that make C++ awesome, definitely not the language itself (although the core is improving).
Is there a rayon replacement in C++ (lightweight tasks for parallelism with a lock-free work-stealing scheduler), other than Cilk itself, which isn't really C++?
This is a good thing, but is orthogonal to single threaded performance (which from what I've read, the Rust team definitely cares about).