You would be enlightened the same way or even more if you started with Haskell. That is, it is not Scala you are so excited about but the functional programming.
Btw, the actual thing to be inspired with in Scala is immutability and Option/Some/None instead of null. These are the things that make you code stable and reliable.
Also, when I code in Scala, I frequently google and end up learning something new about the language. I know it sounds like distraction/wasting time, but there's a certain satisfaction when I found the "Scalaic" way of doing things, like, "There's gotta be a one-liner way of doing this."
Of course, my complain is still compile time (yes it's significantly faster, but I'm impatient).