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> clang is better than gcc, IMO

Maybe. Maybe not. But I don't think that's the reason homebrew doesn't have gcc. The OP is pointing out homebrew isn't extensive, and misses some commonly used utilities.

clang either does not build or defectively builds certain things on OS X, for instance Ruby 1.9.3. I had to acquire vanilla GCC for this reason the other day, and was relieved to find it in HomeBrew.

Ruby 1.9.3 working fine here and built with clang. What was defective?

Old-ass versions of Clang would build Ruby and PostgreSQL (client) binaries which would segfault upon execution. Try grabbing the latest XCode/command line tools package and you should be fine. I've been running Ruby 1.9.3 with Clang for quite a while.

brew install rbenv ruby-build; /* rc file shenanigans */; rbenv install 1.9.3-p327; rbenv global 1.9.3-p327; ruby --version

By what metric?