In my view you have compared it to the only other language for which it is small by comparison :) But different strokes for different folks! I have nothing against Scala, its multi-paradigm thing is cool and impressive, it just isn't for me except by way of curiosity.
I think all the links in the first two sections in the What Is Scala[0] docs give the flavor pretty well. It contains a full (and not small) set of OO language functionality, alongside an even more full-featured functional language.
There are a lot of adjectives you can use to describe Scala - mostly good ones! - but "small" just isn't one of them.
It's a personal preference but I'm not a big fan of JVM languages - big startup costs and not having one "true" runtime that is just compiled into the binary are my main reasons. I've spent so much time fiddling with class paths and different JRE versions...