One of the core strengths of Rails is that it is highly opinionated. That's why people talk about doing things "the Rails way". You can always change things if you like (a lot of people change the views to Haml, UJS library to jQuery, and test framework to Rspec), but it assumes sensible, working defaults.

Excellent point. Not being a Rails guy I sometimes forget that being opinionated is considered one of its strengths.

If any framework can get away with doing something like this, it'd be Rails.

At any rate, I'm excited about anything that increases CoffeeScript adoption.

I guess, but at that point, what's the point of bundling support at all? Support is as easy as adding "gem 'coffee-script'" to the Gemfile.

[edit] And with SCSS also slated to be the default, it seems consistent with "the Rails way" moving forward.