On the whole, I don't see a problem with doing Delphi (or Free Pascal + Lazarus) in school, especially if students have studied Pascal earlier - it teaches them many of the same concepts they'll later see in the likes of Java and C++, and it gives them powerful tools to create "real" GUI apps. There are better options these days, but it's not the worst one.
I think that Delphi could be a good language to teach in, but in practice it doesn't seem to be. You lose a lot of students along the way that feel it's irrelevant. In classes where you have a really good teacher they would add in "modules" of their own, irrespective of whether the syllabus makes sense or not. Often, however, a class barely gets through the standard workload to start off with.
The first time I had an idea of what programming was, was when I saw my brother trying to explain to me that the window had code that ran it. Of course, I ignored him...
We later did Delphi at school, which was maybe a crazy pedagogical decision. The only thing I would say pedagogically useful was that you wrote PUBLIC and PRIVATE for variables, but C or Java has that for functions.
One way in which I would say my fascination differed is this:
> the realization that you can create something that works with code
A lot of programmers mention the ability to write concrete instructions as their first realisation. OP is closer to my experience, but to me the a-ha moment was more surreal: It is strange to me, even today, how a computer can even exist at all. I often refer to that when I think the world is unstructured.
So, things like NAND gates (and fully homomorphic encryption) are almost mystical; more generally, I feel like computers are something of a vindication for mathematics that started in the Renaissance. Things can be mystical and mundane at the same time. There is a joke about this along the lines of a specific type of medical doctor, but I don't think I can post it here...