Someone I know is heavily involved in Ripple, to the point of trying to set up one of those 'gateway' things as a business. He's a smart guy and I don't think he's gullible enough to fall for an obvious scam, but perhaps the Ripple people are clever as well and have some secret to making money beyond their public declaration that they've 'premined' some ripple for the purposes of bringing in a return as a business (I'm pretty sure they had originally posted that on their web-site, didn't they?).
I still have no clue how this crap works but if doesn't give me real bitcoins or cash at the end the day he's going to be in trouble
Of course it does. Ripple is a deposit method on Bitstamp. You can transfer funds on ripple to bitstamp, and buy BTC.
Or you can just do it automatically from the
Ripple client. Just click "send", put in a BTC address, and it will use the cheapest bitcoin bridge (usually Bitstamp's) to deliver BTC to the bitcoin address.