I think it's a reasonable statement, if the following premises are accepted:

1. It is easier and quicker to develop a correct solution in a higher level language than a lower level one.

2. Expressiveness / abstraction come at the cost of time and space efficiency.

Thus, if time and space efficiency are not a concern, then the higher level language should be preferred.

What are some other benefits of C or Java over something like Ruby and Python?

The level of abstraction matches most hardware.

Not all code written in C is performance-critical. But sometimes it's still the best choice if your code is directly talking to hardware.

In that case wouldn't you write some components in C and glue it all together with something like ruby?

Sure, that sounds reasonable. But you've still chosen C to talk to the hardware.

If you're using ruby or python you're ultimately using C anyway, right ;)