Oh, I agree. Every time someone advocates Erlang they mention how it was used to build super-reliable telecoms and they start mentioning three-letter acronyms and immediately everyone's eyes glaze over. It just isn't sexy like node (yet?).
One could compare Node.js to Twisted, Tornado or EventMachine. However, comparing Erlang to Node.js is somehow weird as they have different paradigms — Erlang is highly-concurrent with its "green" processes, while Node is single-process single-thread with "asynchronous" paradigm.
(However, there are some aspects, that could be compared. Erlang has "let it crash" motto, while in Node.js one has to be careful with any exceptions. Erlang is distributed and Node.js has no notion of processes.)