I didn't either, until I tried it. On one level, yes, it's java with type inference and lambdas and saves you typing. When you dig a little deeper in scala, things like case classes (immutability), pattern matching, for comprehension (monad syntax) suddenly fundamentally change the way you program.

Code becomes a lot more clear, explicit, and... fun. I recently talked to a dev who used Akka with java for a network server, and he ended up coding it in 'an object for each callback handler' style.

When I asked why he did it that way, he said nesting callbacks to sequence operations would get too ugly fast.

This is trivial in scala. The language flaws in java ended up dictating the architecture of his entire application, and for the worse IMO.