Ruby definitely owes a big part of its popularity and awareness to Rails. I think all Ruby committers admit this fact.

That said, Rails is hardly the only framework that has brought Ruby to the communities outside of Japan. Chef/Puppet/Fluentd played a key role in bringing Ruby to the ops world while books like "Understanding Computing" by Tom Stuart demonstrates Ruby's potential beyond web programming.

There's a tangible tension between Rails fanatics and sans-Rails Rubyists, but they have needed each other to get where they are today.