Following are some snippets that illustrate the capabilities I'm curious about, and unfortunately too lazy / backlogged on my reading to answer myself.

Automatic get/set method creation:

class Foo
        attr_accessor :bar, :baz, :foo
    end
[download]

Now the class Foo has accessor methods (getter and setter) for the instance vars bar, baz and foo. A total of six methods were created from that one line of code. No need for a 'modern Java IDE' - vi or emacs work fine. You want read-only access? Use attr_reader then only the getter methods will be created

Passing code blocks around as macros

That's what I'm talking about. In Python you can't do something like this:

def my_while(cond)
  return @ret unless cond
  @ret = yield
  retry
end
  
my_while i<10 {
  puts "i: #{i}"
  j = 0
  my_while j<10 {
    puts " j: #{j}"
    j+=1
  }
  i+=1
}
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my_while looks like a natural extension of the language. I'm sure you could duplicate this function in Python, but it wouldn't look like a natural part of the language.

Miscellaneous claims

As far as Ruby vs. Python features go:
1) code blocks. Ruby lets you pass code blocks around. Sounds pretty dull, eh? But in fact it's what makes it possible to create Domain Specific Languages in Ruby quite easily without needing to create a special parser. In many ways Rails can be thought of as a domain specific language built on Ruby.
2) classes are always open in Ruby(including the Class class). By 'open' I mean you can always add new methods to a class (or even a particular object). Another feature that makes it easy to create DSLs
3) continuations. (Not that Rails makes use of them, but some other Ruby-based web programming frameworks do)
4) Ruby has true lambdas. AFAIK Python's lambdas are pretty limited (limited to one expression?)

Also, can you embed Python in HTML? (seems that the whitespace issue would cause a lot of problems with doing that)

I'm just looking for the practical solutions...

Give RoR a try. You might just find that it'll do everything you need it to do now without needing to wait around for a Python-based clone. What could be more practical?