Define "new" please.

1. Invariable variables.
This appears to have been done for no reason other than the designer's preference. In fact, it's not strictly true -- variables can be unbound, and later bound. They just can't be re-bound once bound.

2. Weird syntax.
Why, exactly, are there three different kinds of (required) line endings? It seems as though the syntax is designed to be as different from C as possible, while maintaining at least as many quirks. Moreso, even -- when constructing normal, trivial programs, you're going to hit most language features head-on and at their worst. Where's my 'print "hello\n"' that works most other places?

I don't believe the important features of Erlang are mutually-exclusive with the sane syntax of, say, Ruby or Python.

3. Not Unicode-ready.
Strings are defined as ASCII -- maybe latin1. But there's no direct unicode support in the language -- if you're lucky, there are functions you can pipe it through.

There are other things I haven't mentioned, mostly implementation-specific -- things like the fact that function-reloading cannot be done when you natively-compile (with hipe) for extra speed. My plan is to take the features I actually like from Erlang and implement them elsewhere, in a language I can actually stomach for its real tasks.