After I egged him on via twitter, Scott Chacon of GitHub fame started work on a Ruby binding for libfreenect tonight. All it does so far is list devices, connect, and blink the LED, but it's a great start. I'm hoping to dive in on it later this week.
https://github.com/schacon/kinectaby
If anyone else has any Ruby native extensions knowledge they'd be super welcome as well.
yours,
Greg