Incorrect. Eclipse remains superior and is in far greater use across the world and the enterprise landscape.
I myself found Eclipse cumbersome and lacking in capacity. I do respect others' preference for it, but it cannot be said to be objectively superior.
I love the ease with which you can reconfigure the layout from task to task with IntelliJ. "Distraction Free" mode shows that they "get" what bugs many people about IDEs sucking up screen space for very little in some cases.
Main benefits:
- The whole thing is free. No pro or enterprise version. (That said this isn't cheapness on my side: I can have an IntelliJ license any day I ask my boss as he is an incurable fan. For me it is enough to fix his IntelliJ once in a while. ;-)
- Happily uses Maven poms as project models. No more problems with out of sync IDE configs. What builds on the build server is exactly what I see in the Project view.
- Standard keybindings follows modern OS conventions and you can switch to Eclipse or IntelliJ keybindings in options if you want.
- Doesn't scare noobs the way eclipse does. Not a problem for me, I used to love eclipse, but for a team lead this might be an advantage.
Since IntelliJ Studio is the defacto standard in Java IDEs (having surpassed Eclipse and Netbeans) I think that it is really great for students to be able use that IDE for their student projects.
Of course the usage of the IDE must not prevent then from familiaring themselves with classpaths and compiling a Java program with more than one packages through the command line!