You probably won't find many projects built "just" in Groovy - because of its JVM nature, you're more likely to find Java projects which are enhanced with Groovy (Groovy plugin for Hudson, for example, and the Play framework supporting Groovy in templates). Gradle as a build tool is starting to get some traction.
Groovy will probably be more behind the scenes than you'd like for a 'hey boss everyone is using this' sort of pitch, but it's not going away any time soon, and adoption is growing.
Biases on the table - I've done a number of mid-scale projects in Grails over the past several years, and I also run groovymag.com.
As for wide adoption, Groovy's used in Grails but not many people seem interested in it as a standalone language. See O'Reilly's book sales for the year to March 2012 (http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2012/03/Lang_QTR_Units_PrevY...).
http://grails.org/Success+Stories
and note that Groovy is commercially supported by SpringSource, a division of VMWare. I'm guessing your boss has heard of VMWare.
I think one can make a case that Groovy comes pretty damn close, and at least as close as any other "scripting language on the JVM."
Platform: Well, it's the JVM.
Wide Adoption: Define "wide?" But from what I can see, Groovy is pretty popular, especially Grails. There are plenty of books on Groovy/Grails, Grails meetups / users groups in many cities, an active community of developers, etc. There are even consulting companies that focus on Groovy and Grails. SpanTree in Chicago, IL come to mind.
Familiar Syntax: Groovy is great in this regard, as almost any .java file can be renamed to .groovy and compiled with groovyc. Most of the syntax that's different between Java and Groovy is optional in Groovy, so you can start off writing Groovy that is very Java-like and slowly evolve to more idiomatic Groovy over time.
Maintainability: No better or worse than any other dynamic language, IMO. If you have access to metaprogramming and duck-typing and what-not, there opportunity for abuse is there. But Groovy's culture does not seem to be big on a lot of BFM.
hard to really fuck things up too badly - hmm... that's pretty subjective, but to that point, Groovy does have unit-testing tools, static analysis tools, etc. available. The ecosystem might not quite as rich as of that for pure Java, but I think you can find what you need to create a sane development environment.