It has good food, a mixture of tin-and-timber, modern, suburban, apartment living, it has great weather. It doesn't have Coogee or Bondi or Manly and it has a lot of urban sprawl, but within 2h drive are rainforest, beaches, hills.
It has good schools and universities for that stage of life, the inner city is much less frenetic than Sydney's equivalent. We don't have paddy's markets but we do have good food markets, if smaller. Less of a night-life scene but not none.
I've tried to move to Brisbane around 5 years ago and even had an episode working remotely for a company located in there which wanted to sponsor me, but ultimately the compensation vs COL ratio seemed very bad, even if you compare it to Europe, so I didn't pull the trigger.
At that time there were really only a few interesting jobs in web development (I specialize in Ruby on Rails). Is it better now?
I don't know much about the ruby scene here, sorry.