yep, i'm also working on a react/redux project (where i'm only js senior and rest of the team are rails devs with only basic js skills) and big advantage is, how easily and quickly they became productive. We have other project in Ember, where logic was to take advantage of similar concepts & conventions as in rails, but in reality it's incomparable.
i'm using it on first project and it's very nice. they let you export your complete api definition to apiary.apib file which can be parsed with their github.com/apiaryio/blueprint-parser into json and used with your custom server localy. it's also nice for synchronizing between devs, when added to vcs ...
yesss, laravel is the most promising of all. few weeks ago, i wanted to make small site in php, i evaluated nette (poor docs, bugs), silex (couldn't get autoloading to work on shared host) and finaly laravel - by far best! especialy eloquent orm is simple yet very usable AR impl, all api's very simple and clean - this fw has very railsy feeling overall.
there is laravel 4 behind the doors, i was playing little bit with it, it's even better (copy of rails :-)) - autor claims full DI support so testing should be simple...