I believe someone has made the defensible claim that most of their activity occurs via clients (twhirl, alert thingy) and SMS over the API rather than through the website. Unless they are using ActionController and ActionView to do the rendering and output there, it seems they would be using "traditional RoR" in a very limited capacity.
I'm not being an apologist, but I think if people are discussing Twitter and scaling for the purposes of learning something useful and not just framework bashing, language bashing or avoiding doing homework, we should probably avoiding talking as if they use the full stack in a significant way as it's a red herring.