That doesn't make it false.
Personally I think the syntax in scala is even uglier than Java's, if such a feat were possible, and looking at scala code makes me want to stab my eyes out with forks. Thankfully I don't think I'll have to touch the JVM any time soon.
You realize that none of your points are actually related to the language itself?
Yes, Scala's syntax is ugly, just look at this cryptic operator soup: int[][]_00_[][]=null;
What on earth is that? I've never seen anything like that in Scala code?
It's not false, it's just silly.
Isn't that just repeating the “all languages are equal”-myth?
The analogy is perfectly fine imho.
No, it's debunking the myth that you can compare any two languages and say which one is objectively superior.
There is no such total ordering.
There are certainly languages which are comparatively close, so that it is hard to tell, and where different weightings can lead to different results. That doesn't mean it is like this for every comparison.
For instance, the comparison between Java and Scala certainly doesn't belong to this group, just like comparing PHP with many other languages also leads to a clear outcome.
But honestly, I don't care. There are also people claiming that there is no "objective superiority" in cases like "evolution vs. intelligent design", "6000yo universe vs. billions of years", "software patents vs. no software patents", "no contraception/abortion vs. women's rights".
Right reaction is to laugh and move on.
It's always about context: if an A/B test show you that changing a button's color from red to blue increases conversion rates by 50%, than red really is superior to blue for this context. Same, if your developers are 50% more productive in Scala than in Java that Scala is a better language for you, same way that red really is superior to blue in the above.
And I really like the dream of a "language agnostic-framework", though I know it's not really possible. It would be cool to have a Play framework which also supports Clojure or JPython or JRuby, as for some developer teams these languages might be superior to Java or Scala - but I know that the development effort would be huge*. But in the real world, 90% of good programmers will take Scala over Java anytime, even if they'll have to learn it! Heck, I'd take C# on mono over Java any day!