You might want to watch Paul Phillips' recent talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jh94gowim0
You will probably start changing your mind about whether Scala is a "better" language. Especially on the collections side.
> to get all the benefits without the drawbacks of Java style subtyping.
Actually, the Scala collections have the exact same problems caused by subtyping that Java does (and quite a few more actually, as Paul explains).