Can this logic be applied to another environment that has had a ton of money poured into it? Specifically, .NET. Can you replace Ruby/Python in the question with C# and if so, why doesn't the latter benefit from money and experienced developers?
You can spend money on performance or on features.
Google has historically been good at high performance computing, and chose to spend enough money to get and fund a team of experts on building high performance VMs.
Microsoft has historically been good at adding backwards compatible feature sets, and chose to spend enough money to get and fund a team of experts on tasteful design and evolution of programming languages.
