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Except they are "only" trying to replace perhaps the single most ingrained language of all time, that is, Javascript in browsers. And I'll warrant that the more ingrained a language is, the more it's contender needs to be exciting, and yes, even hyped, and catter to developer motivation and happiness.True, they need "hype", but exciting in the way asked above just throws most developers off of it. No exciting language ever gained a stronghold in the market. Even Lisp in the AI/Lisp Machines era and Smalltalk in its heyday were marginal.
<b>Having said that, I think they could find some success in, say, making Chrome run Dart natively (as well as Javascript for the time being) and then getting other more hyped languages to compile to Dart.</b>
They do have Dart run natively in Dartium, a special Chrome version IIRC. But obviously I can't see Apple/Mozilla/MS playing along and adding Dart to their browsers.
One way they could gain ground would be to use the server side advantage (since they want Dart to work on the server too):
Make a better Node.js like environment with Dart, with no callback-spaghetti and single-thread issues, and add a top-notch web framework for it, suitable for both Rails and client-rendering style web development. Add MySQL/PostgreSQL and Mongo drivers.
I think something like that will catch on like wildfire.