Python has a great, clean, compact and expressive syntax and a lot of syntactic sugar. Erlang does concurrency and error handling well. A mix of the two would be a great language to work with.
JavaScript - the ugly + OO + update to the standard library. That's it. Essentially what frameworks like MooTools try to make it into.
Ah. I think I was getting caught up in the idea that a "replacement" was something completely different and not an evolution change in JavaScript. But it's all just a matter of terminology at that point.