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I think Heroku is not so much about Rails than about Ruby. You can use any rack-based app here, as well as host long-running job workers.

In the non-startup enterprises (I work with those), the work is usually to glue things together. Call a legacy web-service here, run a worker there, put things back into a legacy CRM etc. Ruby is perfect for that.

JRuby is even better, actually, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Heroku support it later on.

Heroku is also planning on rolling out node.js support which will help round them out even further.

It's funny but just as backend platforms really started to get good all the action shifted back to the client.

Entertaining, as a lot of Heroku's infrastructure is built on Erlang.