it has more than sugar - for example, the type system is extended to include handle nulls correctly - http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/Kotlin/Null-safety - and it has extension functions (to solve (some of) the same kind of problems as scala's implicit conversions)

jetbrains is an interesting company. they have managed to produce a successful product (intellij idea) despite being in competition with a hugely successful open source project (eclipse). i was thinking about this just last night, when i gave up using eclipse in despair (maven nested projects, fwiw) and decided to upgrade my idea licence to the new release - it's impressive how much better it is. so they must have some smart people; i hope this works out.