What I like best about Clojure is that it's so opinionated. It says: "this is how you should program". It has opinions on state and concurrency, on data structures and polymorphism, and on meta-programming. I think this is what sets it apart from all current programming languages except, possibly, Erlang.
Also, the JVM should appeal mostly to people not "coming from Java". Java devs already have the JVM. They're only getting a great programming language. I think that the biggest selling point of all modern JVM languages is the JVM - the absolutely best software platform in existence. I know of no other platform that comes close to the JVM in performance, monitoring, tooling and a wide ecosystem. Programmers that shied away from Java's verbosity and boilerplate can finally take advantage of the awesome JVM.
Also, the JVM should appeal mostly to people not "coming from Java". Java devs already have the JVM. They're only getting a great programming language. I think that the biggest selling point of all modern JVM languages is the JVM - the absolutely best software platform in existence. I know of no other platform that comes close to the JVM in performance, monitoring, tooling and a wide ecosystem. Programmers that shied away from Java's verbosity and boilerplate can finally take advantage of the awesome JVM.