I find that rather hard to swallow. If you are trying to deploy PHP frameworks on your own there are a number of hoops you need to jump through on the server side to get things going. If you are using a deployment service, it's hard to beat things like Heroku and AWS ElasticBeanstalk for deploying Rails application.

I am definitely a fan of Ruby and Rails. So I am biased. But I have deployed my fair share of PHP and find it hard to imagine how it is easier.

>AWS ElasticBeanstalk

We're talking about novice web development and you're invoking AWS?

PHP is unzip, plug and play. Or single click any VPS "LAMP" package and go.

EDIT: Also, let's assume the target person runs a Windows machine. XAMPP is at least... 10 times easier to set up than Ruby/Rails on a local instance. And that's being exceptionally charitable.

For many php frameworks it's as simple as downloading a zip file and ftping files to your hostgator shared account.

Places like digitalocean have prebuilt machines for both. On a new centos or ubuntu server installing php/composer/laravel can be done in 10 steps.

In the laravel world we have forge which allows you to script and provision your stack