It has a state-of-the-art Virtual Machine, rich concurrency facilities (why does everyone forget this?), reasonable type safety, great tooling, and it operates within a diverse ecosystem of languages using the same infrastructure.

But yeah, I have always liked the argument of throwing a curve ball at the kids who were already programming in imperative languages. It also levels the playing field and those who hadn't had any prior experience tend to perform better without feeling so inadequate next to their peers.