> -It uses farmiliar curly brace syntax. And does so consistently.

Not quite consistently, semicolons are optional: http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/Kotlin/Grammar#Gramm...

The rule is "newline or semicolon", so whitespace does carry a meaning.

IMHO this is a mistake, because it is often fragile and can lead to code that the compiler reads differently than the human sitting in front of the screen.

And yes, I maintain that that's a mistake in javascript and Go too.

Apart from that, I agree with your conclusions. I'll try it out as soon as they release the compiler.