Yeah, but setting up a rails or django server/hosting environment for development is a lot more difficult than a comparable php setup; tools like MAMP, XAMP, et al make it fairly trivial to get going quickly.
XAMPP/MAMP and others like it seem like they make life easier until you hit a point where you realize that they are seriously leaky implementations. I wish I had time to write in detail about this (because I also hate when people make claims like this without showing examples); however, I have a feeling that the people that would benefit the most won't care anyway.
Don't these distros still put php.ini in c:\windows?
You need mysql-python, which depends on some header from mysql-client-dev, which requires some compiling or package, then there's PIL, virtualenv, uwsgi and shit.
Oh wait, you don't have pip on most distros by default. You need to apt-get or wget that.