Having the 99.9% of ruby users who don't have a religious problem with rubygems all specify rubygems on the commandline seems like a more ugly hack than having the 3 developers in the world who care about this problem alter their environment.
You underestimate the amount of discontent with rubygems. There is at least one replacement available (hellorip.com) and for good reason. I've already come across a few libs that use it exclusively.
Ruby 1.9 actually ignores "require 'rubygems'" entirely which I suppose will make this whole issue moot, as soon as we all start using it.. um, any day now.
