I selected Scala (with Play Framework) for mostly the same reasons: JVM ecosystem, expressiveness, thread-safety, hybrid functional and OO style, type safety and good runtime performance. I chose it over C#, Java, Python and Ruby. After using it for over a year, my experience is very much alike to the one described in this article. I don't see myself switching language or platform anytime soon.
Same here.
The article also highlights that adopting Scala often also means adopting a more functional programming style.