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For me it is the vastly superior tooling.

* Best IDEs around. (Yes better than .net ecosystem)

* JVM monitoring (Flight Control, VisualVM)

* Performance Sampling/Profiling <1% perf cost

* actually being cross platform (yes, mono, bla)

Ability to use Clojure, Scala, Freje, Groovy, Java, Javascript, Python etc all on the one platform and share libraries and objects between each other.

People forget that Java has the best ecosystem of libraries bar none especially when you get into the more enterprise areas e.g. Big Data.

One-and-done is my favorite way of thinking about using Java. The JVM provides the perfect, for my use case, amount of abstraction from the hardware while still allowing you to do some amazing things.

There is also a huge amount of features that are supported by the JVM that Java still doesn't make use of.

There is also a great JIT and garbage collector.

Yes, but I suppose this is more the JVM than the language itself. The JVM is quite convincing though, hence Clojure, Scala, etc.