Half of it was true for Ruby — many people were unaware. What they don't have in common is people's immediate reaction upon discovering the language.
Common first exposure to Ruby: "Oh, wow, that's cool. It looks pretty easy."
Common first exposure to Erlang: "Oh, wow, I didn't know you could code in Klingon."
I do agree, though, that Erlang could probably gain a lot more popularity if somebody introduced a framework that really showed what it could do. The most popular web framework right now (at least I think it's the most popular — there aren't any official polls or anything) is MochiWeb, which kindasorta doesn't have any documentation.
MochiWeb is a web server, not a web framework. People use nitrogen(1) and webmachine(2) over it. Nitrogen is a pretty fully featured framework, and webmachine is a really light layer that bakes in http/REST semantics.
I pretty much exclusively use webmachine with ErlyDTL (an implementation of the Django templating system) on top.
There's also erlangweb, and a few others. Both nitrogen and webmachine are pretty well documented. I think it's still all of the periods and arrows that are scaring people off.
Given the visceral reactions to the syntax, perhaps Erlang could be boosted via a CoffeeScript-esque language that compiles down to it? No idea how practical that is with Erlang's idioms but CS helped some previously JS-shy folks get on board.
There already is one: Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org). It's created by Jose Valim, who (as you probably know) is also a member of the Rails core team. It's a very interesting language.
Common first exposure to Ruby: "Oh, wow, that's cool. It looks pretty easy."
Common first exposure to Erlang: "Oh, wow, I didn't know you could code in Klingon."
I do agree, though, that Erlang could probably gain a lot more popularity if somebody introduced a framework that really showed what it could do. The most popular web framework right now (at least I think it's the most popular — there aren't any official polls or anything) is MochiWeb, which kindasorta doesn't have any documentation.