Cypher expressses the graph patterns that you're looking for in an ASCII-art-syntax, so you don't loose sight of the core of your question. On top of that you get filtering, projection, aggregation, pagination.

The most fun things are in-query dataflow which allows you to pass information from one query part to the next (projected, aggregated, ordered etc).

And the really cool collection and map functions, so you save a lot of roundtrips between client and server.

See: http://neo4j.com/developer/guide-sql-to-cypher/