While generally Ruby 1.9 is a lot more lenient about trailing commas in lists and list-like representations than previous versions, there are some new occasions where it will throw a syntax error. This seems to be one. Ruby 1.9 treats this as strictly as a method definition and won't allow that stray comma.
You've also seem to run up against an edge-case bug in Ruby 1.8.7 that has been corrected. The list expansion method doesn't seem to work with only one item.
A quick fix in this case might be:
ary.map{|x, (y,_)| [x, y] }
In this case _
functions as a whatever variable.
In both versions you should get:
[[11, 1], [22, 2], [33, 3]]