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I'd say Scala is the real replacement for Java (especially since it does not suffer from Groovy's performance hit). I'd take a statically typed language any time.

You are right, I like Groovy but Scala is the next step but I hope the fix the tooling.

I disagree. Scala is too "heady" and unapproachable for a lot of developers. I prefer a language and framework that makes creating applications easier. It's my opinion that Groovy/Grails is better at this than Scala.

This doesn't make sense to me. You're comparing a language and a framework, Groovy/Grails, to just a language, Scala. By this logic, does that mean Java itself is too "heady" and unapproachable for a lot of developers too?

Let me clarify. I believe my argument holds true for:
Groovy vs. Scala
Groovy vs. Java
Groovy/Grails vs. Scala/Lift

Scala is fine, I'm just of the opinion that Groovy is easier to learn.

You are *probably* right. But Scala seems a lot more powerful...and it does not suffer from Groovy's relative performance problem (compared to Java).
That's a big thing.

It may very well change when all the dynamic JVM languages get updated to use invokedynamic. That may be the game changer for dynamic languages. If JRuby or Jython could run at Java speeds that would be a huge boost.