Once you're at the capistrano level, deployment is a different game.. I'm talking about relatively small projects (I wouldn't deploy a big project on GAE anyway

Once you're at the capistrano level, deployment is a different game.. I'm talking about relatively small projects (I wouldn't deploy a big project on GAE anyway, if only to avoid the lock-in to Google) I totally agree on most of issues you raise (once GAE Rails would work locally, console, testing etc could be resolved I suppose) - I would definitely not build any size Rails project for GAE right now. But if Rails community would put some work into that, I think it might be a great rapid dev/deploy/scale solution.