Phoenix is frankly a lot more than Rails. If you pop open observer on a running phoenix app (:observer.start), you'd see that it's actually a collection of dozens of processes. The power of phoenix is that it's really just those processes running on BEAM in a dependency tree, so you can easily extend that and add more processes to the startup list. My phoenix app that's running in production isn't just a rails replacement; it also has long-running genserver processes for caching, communicating with key/value stores, etc, with supervisors to recover gracefully from crashes.

If you're looking for cool Elixir applications that aren't web-oriented, look into the Nerves project (http://nerves-project.org/).