Clojure's been popular in the hacker community for a good 2 years now. That's a weak argument.
And Clojure has been known for a good two years now, but I would not have said Clojure was popular two years ago. It didn't have a lot of regular users, which is what you're observing when you say people aren't solving "real problems" in it. I'm not sure I'd even say Clojure is popular today. I'd say it's still roughly where Ruby was in 2004 — lots of excitement, but still lots of growing to do.
When Rails came out it solved all kinds of new problems. For one, by using metaprogramming a whole bunch of files were eliminated. As soon as Rails came out I was much more productive than I was with Tapestry or Wicket. Not so with Clojure.
Just because it doesn't necessarily better solve your class of problems doesn't mean it's unsuitable for other people's.
I'm impressed by results
The reason why people want Clojure on the web could be (or "How Clojure can make your life easier for webapplications):
1. Use FP in the Web (I mean general imutability not closures) 2. Safe and easy concurency 3. Tons of java librarys for general stuff that you might do 4. Very powerful meta programming. Rails has shown this to be a win and with Clojure much more is possible.
I've been in the Clojure community for some time and the real "boom" of Webapplications in Clojure has only really lifted in the last year. I think its pretty impressiv how the Webstack developed in that time.