>But, language rant aside, even if Scala were the cat's meow, >you still have to include the Scala base libraries with every >app. Proguard may help, but it seems wasteful.

As someone who is using scala for 2 android apps one small and another smaller, Proguard does more than maybe help, it shrinks it to a small size. From the Scala for Android page:

AndroidForScala includes a treeshaker (proguard) that removes all the parts of the android-scala library that you don't use. For a simple "hello world" the scala library takes up about 10kb, and for a larger real world app (500kb), the library takes up more like 25kb.