I found it interesting that matz would say that, given how little ruby innovates in terms of programming concepts.
> I'm a language geek, so I'm not really interested in using it, but I'm pretty interested in studying it
That probably means that if Matz stumbled upon ruby, he wouldn't even have bothered looking at it.
EDIT:
I'll extend on my comment a little. I think both ruby and clojure are language designed to be used by regular programmers, even if clojure probably aims more at 'language geeks' as Matz says. So i'd say, whatever his justifications are, it would have been interesting if Matz looked at both languages in a similar way.
Also i'd say that for such languages, it's more the way that 'features' are assembled, and which restrictions are imposed to the programmer, that makes the language interesting or not, and that if examined under that angle, clojure takes a bolder step in the direction of interesting IMHO.
EDIT2: I'm not flaming, just expressing my point of view, so if you downvote, have at least the courtesy of explaining why you disagree.