Sure. The ability to inspect what the system is doing and interact with it while it's running full-speed is unparalleled, and only pulling further ahead than anything else out there. Just take a look at monitoring tools like VisualVM, or Java Flight Recorder, which is part of the Oracle JDK and free for development use. You can inject and take out code at runtime, and the same monitoring and management API, JMX, is standard and used by everything from the JVM, the JDK libraries, various frameworks, and all the way up to the application code. With the proper tools, you can record everything your app is doing with very little overhead.

In addition, the GCs and the compiler are pretty much the best in the business, and the next-gen compiler, Graal, is probably the biggest breakthrough in compiler technology of the past decade. Apart from jaw-dropping optimizations, it lets you control machine code generation.

Last but not least, critical parts of the standard library (though not all of it) -- such as the concurrency packages, which contains schedulers and concurrent data structures -- are of quality that is hard to match.