Managing dependencies is a hard problem, and I admire the Ruby community for taking it on, and the big projects (Rails, Rspec) for having the guts to move forward with early implementations.
The payoff will be that setting up Rails apps, installing libraries that are both compatible AND up-to-date, will be fundamentally easier. It will be a competitive advantage for Rails.
I don't think I would consider package dependencies to be magic. Also, the solution to this whole problem is simply `bundle install --binstubs && bin/rake test`. I don't really think there is much to freak out about.
Now everyone is writing articles to explain the mess. Here's one from Wyatt Greene:
http://techiferous.com/2011/05/the-no-nonsense-guide-to-mana...