Perhaps it's not Scala but the paradigms that define it that are "state of the art". Multiple paradigms like functional programming, OOP, and other nice syntactical things make Scala very much a language of the future, even if its current implementation is poor. It's a marker to where we may be headed in language development.

The presentation is worth reading. Scala is an awesome language whose main disadvantage is that it is a language for smart people.

http://www.paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html

State of the art doesn't mean good implementation of state of the art. I personally wouldn't call Scala bad either, but that's another discussion.