I've been using VE for long enough that the "gee whiz" feeling has worn off, but seeing people react to the demos I did at JavaOne brought it all back.
There were a couple of features people responded to especially strongly. The simplicity of getting a model-driven application up and running was one of the biggies. I suspect people have been conditioned to think "model driven" means "long term benefits at the cost of a nasty short term learning curve". It was fun showing how you can going in just a couple of minutes.
Web developers liked the continuation[1]-based workflows that let you specify a complex linked set of interactions without having to do your own state management or routing, and everybody got a kick out of the "execute" button that lets you run the model even if you've just specified a couple of incomplete classes.
OK, evidently when I'm enthusiastic I write stuff that reads like a sales brochure, but if you can get past that definitely check out the continuations-based stuff. It means your web application code looks like ordinary desktop application code (do something, get some input, based on input decide to get more input, etc). It doesn't hit you how much easier that approach is until you have to go back to coding the usual way. It's probably worth a whole blog post just on that.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation#Continuations_in_Web_development
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