Strictly, strictly, strictly speaking, you're right: 1.8.7 is the current "production" version of Ruby.
However, Ruby 1.9 has been around for about a year now (considered a "development" release) but Ruby 1.9.1 will become the "production" version of Ruby when it's released in the next month (yeah, I know that makes no sense). The current preview releases are pretty spot on though - so we're in a transitional phase. Ruby 1.9's performance is also somewhat better than that of 1.8.
If we're not strictly speaking about stable, widely available versions, how about we talk about how awesome Perl 6 is? Because it really is astonishingly, mind-bendingly awesome.
Granted, the leading Perl 6 implementation is still a little over a year away (though Parrot hits 1.0 in March, which is a pretty cool milestone in and of itself), and I imagine Ruby 1.9 will be widely available long before then.
However, Ruby 1.9 has been around for about a year now (considered a "development" release) but Ruby 1.9.1 will become the "production" version of Ruby when it's released in the next month (yeah, I know that makes no sense). The current preview releases are pretty spot on though - so we're in a transitional phase. Ruby 1.9's performance is also somewhat better than that of 1.8.
On the 1.8 front, Ruby 1.8 has had what's called KCODE for years now, which enables Unicode support for various bits and pieces (primarily regular expressions). More info on this here: http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/the_kcode_variable_...