User input stored as a string ($stdin.gets.chomp)

Following along with LRtHW on exercise 31 and I was wondering why the author was testing the user input as a string.

There was an exercise that covered gets.chomp but I never thought about it returning a string.  Then I found this documentation...

http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/Tutorial/part_02/user_input.html

I was assuming that it would take the user input as is but the above link states...

1. chomp is a string method (String#chomp).
2. gets returns (gives you back) a string.

When I changed the code in the exercise from...

puts "You enter a dark room with two doors. Do you go through door #1 or door #2?"

print "> "

door = $stdin.gets.chomp

if door == "1"

  puts "There's a giant bear here eating cheese cake. What do you do?"

end

...to...

puts "You enter a dark room with two doors. Do you go through door #1 or door #2?"

print "> "

door = $stdin.gets.chomp.to_i

if door == 1

  puts "There's a giant bear here eating cheese cake. What do you do?"

end

..it worked as expected.