First, the fact that this language is coming from the Eclipse team suggests to me that they are probably not limited to macro transformations, at least at a fundamental level. The main reason Java folks like Eclipse is that it has a global understanding of Java code (this is why plugins for text editors tend to flat out suck compared to real Java IDEs, they are mostly dealing with local information), and I'd imagine that people working on an IDE that made non-local code comprehension a core focus of the product would make sure they're able to extract that information fairly easily from a language that they designed themselves.

That aside (since I agree that most of what they're doing appears to be fairly local, at the moment), what are the features that you miss in Java anyways, as compared to something like Ruby or Python, once you add closures and a bit of syntax sugar to cut out boilerplate? Past that, I can't think of much that people actually use day-to-day (and no, callcc doesn't count) in Ruby or Python that's not already possible in Java, albeit with a little more line noise. Can you?

When I look at code across many languages, the thing that makes Java code stand out as particularly clumsy is that it forces a lot of local verbosity, and that functional programming is very clumsy due to the lack of closures (though it's possible if you're willing to swallow your pride and endure some pain).