Yes and no, the approach I've used in MVC (.Net) is passing View Models to the View (rather than pure models). That means you can push some of the "tell" into the view model rather than having that logic in the view itself.

I haven't done any RoR but I imagine a similar approach would work there.

I apply this principle to view objects as well. Can you give an example of something you think should be excepted?

I'm still thinking this through, here's what I came up with:

If there's an on/off button to show additional information on the screen, it would seem weird to me to have the button (view) try and display the additional settings. The view has no idea what kind of environment it is in, how does it know if it can display the information without moving other things around. But a controller object managing all the views on the screen does. This also avoids subclassing or adding methods to the view.