Looks to me like Ruby on Rails is pretty much the same as Symfony, and without worrying about which came first, I have to wonder what makes the MVC system so great.
Personally, I prefer using standards (namely SQL and XML) instead of programming language syntaxes - true, it does make things a little sticky from time to time, but it frees up logic into reusable templates, but also makes it really easy to specialize.
That isn't to say that the people who created Ruby on Rails and Symfony didn't do a great job, I really like what they've done with tutorials and generally spreading the word about application frameworks.
I guess my gripes have to do with that this can encourage poor database modeling, because its so easy to connect a web interface with a database, and bridge in some code while your at it.