The interesting thing is that it definitely feels different to me.

While the basic data structure is obviously identical to its counterparts, the way it interacts with the ecosystem as a whole makes it feel way more powerful. The interaction of hashes, symbols, and blocks lead to a language which feels like it is designed with DSLs as first-class citizens. This leads to things like Ruby on Rails, which at first glance feels like pure magic.

I get a somewhat similar feeling about lists in Python. Because of its very extensive list comprehension you start thinking in lists, leading to some very clean code which would be extremely awkward to implement in many other languages.