I view that as a good thing, as cool concepts like Iteratees have been inspired by functional programming and Scala. There aren't many frameworks out there that make it easy to develop traditional websites and web services and do comet/websockets with ease. There aren't many reactive frameworks out there, period.
I also hated Play 1.x because it relied on its own half-baked build system, making it hard to import Maven modules and because the templates were written in Groovy, which for me was a big turn-off, because I like the JVM for its potential for performance and using such a slow dynamic language for its templating was a big no-no (Groovy may have gotten better in the meantime, I don't really know). It also relied on many runtime hacks and bytecode generation, things that have been moved at compile time in Play2 with the help of its SBT integration.
There's many things to like about its preference for the Scala way of doing things. Don't let that stand in the way, as otherwise it's a nice framework.
> Groovy may have gotten better in the meantime, I don't really know
Last year Groovy 2 was released which provides a @CompileStatic annotation which directs the compiler to statically compile the tagged code which runs faster. Not many people seem to be using it though, e.g. Grails and Gradle only use dynamically compiled Groovy code (afaik). And it's still quite buggy, e.g. just yesterday this serious bug was reported: http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/BUG-in-CompileStatic-mode...
Dude, Play 2.x is perfectly fine for Java and will always support both languages.