Why? I mean, for a very basic setup, you just run 'capify .', and then change some passwords, and you're good to go. It doesn't even really take any configuring.
Here's the thing: good engineering means that you should automate as much as possible. That way, everything is consitant. One command deployment is amazing, regardless of your technology stack.
It's more complicated than just scp'ing files over. That's all I have to say. It's fine to say that it's also better engineering, but that doesn't address the original article. Ruby is also a better engineered language than PHP in a lot of ways.
Ruby wasn't even a semi-mainstream competitor for web development until Ruby on Rails came along, so even comparing it to PHP (or worse, thinking Ruby and RoR is the same thing) is where a lot of the confusion starts.
yeah, for most simple apps, scp will do the trick, but anytime you start writing scripts to upload the same set of files on 5 different machines, it's time to use capistrano.
Here's the thing: good engineering means that you should automate as much as possible. That way, everything is consitant. One command deployment is amazing, regardless of your technology stack.