Java is primarily useful for huge things. Since it makes so many things explicit, you can orient yourself very quickly in a project. If you see a symbol, you don't need to pull out a special tool (like cscope for C) to tell where it was defined - the code tells you. Yes, it is possible to write spaghetti Java, but it's easy not to.

Also, if you have something that will be on for a long time and need it to eventually act with compiled speed (e.g. a webapp), java with the JIT is soon as fast as an always-compiled language.

The inability to pass functions as arguments without creating a class for them is one of the annoying parts. Maybe some syntactic sugar will be (or recently has been?) added.