This is well-said. Something I say quite often when Eclipse/IntelliJ comes up: for a while, as an Eclipse and occasional NetBeans user, I thought that I really hated Java. After finding IntelliJ, I realized quite quickly that while I don't love Java (and I do have a laundry list of things-it-must-do-better), what I really hated were my IDEs. IntelliJ for Scala is also just straight-up brilliant.
My only complaint is that even with all the tweaking in the world it's basically impossible to make their Swing-based editor component not look terrible on Linux.
Hmm... other than some issues with disappearing completion windows (probably related to me running XMonad), I haven't really found it to be that ugly on linux... Maybe not very slick, but frankly speaking, for the benefits it's small price :D
Well, yeah, it's workable, but coming from IDEA on Mac it's really distractingly poor. Doesn't seem to matter what settings I tweak or fonts I use--Swing on Linux is just no fun.
My only complaint is that even with all the tweaking in the world it's basically impossible to make their Swing-based editor component not look terrible on Linux.