It's a pity that there's no ruby native way of adding another encoding in Ruby 1.9, it's all down on the C level. Recently I needed to work with the GSM-7 encoding, and while I was tempted to try to add a patch to ruby for including it, I figured it was too marginal to warrant acceptance of the patch.
Are encodings in 1.9 really still that bad -- several years after its initial release.
http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_string
The problem is, when an outside service or file is provided to you, it doesn't always come with information about how the text is encoded. With Ruby 1.9, you have the option of specifying the character encoding for a given string, but if the string is from an outside source, it's often a guessing game.
Really though, the pain in the ass has little to do with 1.9 - encodings are just a pain because they aren't universally supported. So we'll often times get handed bytes with no encoding context so we have to assume or use detection libraries like this.
One argument is "well just use UTF-8 for everything" or "just pass everything around as binary then it'll be fine" - but unfortunately we don't live in a world where either of those solutions will work for everyone.