Yup it's a shame an operating system released as early as this year (mountain lion) came with 1.8.7 because it will be around for quite a while. We recently had to make the difficult decision to continue support of it in a new release because of CentOS, Mountain Lion etc...
You are right, I'm pretty sure everyone who is a professional programmer uses homebrew, it's amazing.
However, coding to 1.8.7 lets those who aren't hardcore rubyists currently enjoy a gem they may otherwise not be able to without having to deal with or even know about rvm or rbenv.
There's gentoo/alt and fink which predates DarwinPorts. I'm sure there is even a pkgsrc user out there. I've occasionally used this one called make. It's sort of a meta language to homebeer. In fact it comes in two flavors pmake and gmake. =P
Please don't let that tempt you to use system Ruby. You should always build your own, especially on a system like OS X.
System Ruby is not there for you, it's there for the system to make use of (and yes, OS X does ship with quite a few Ruby scripts and a couple of Rails applications). Apple makes no guarantees of keeping this Ruby up to date.
I don't know what "vanilla" OSX ships with, but I've seen references to Rails pop up in logs in Console.app for my OSX Server when I was screwing with replacing their Postgres db with my own.
Er, why not? rvm was originally made for production use!
I've used rvm in production for major sites for years with no problems whatsoever, in fact I believe it is best practise. Do you have any reasons for your preference for packaged ruby?
I agree, RVM is a fantastic tool and a god send. Tremendous job by the creator. I just always felt that it was 'odd' to have to install N version of Ruby just to work on a particular project.
RVM is a very impressive collection of monstrous hacks jammed into a kitchen-sink tool to achieve a set of ends that can be better met in other ways. It's worth learning enough about how the Ruby environment fits together to figure out how. It's great to get learners off the ground (assuming it works first time), but if you're doing ruby seriously then I reckon part of your education should be how to get off it as soon as possible.