This has come up before, but I don't like it--symbols and strings feel distinct for me. http://tinyurl.com/6e9fv5 makes some interesting points about (Ruby) symbols, some of which apply here; I think that Ruby 1.9 will make Symbol a subclass of String, and Symbols will effectively be frozen strings (thought that might have gone away). It might be nice if there were some relationship like that with strings and symbols, but I do thing keeping them separate is useful.
