Ted Neward wrote about the Lang.NET symposium (sounds like something I would have loved to attend). This quote seems exactly spot on:

Looking at both languages like F# and Scala, for example, we see a definite hybridization of both functional and object languages, and it doesn’t take much exploration of C#’s and VB’s expression trees facility to realize that they’re already a half-step shy of a full (semantic or syntactic) macro system, something that traditionally has been associated with dynamic languages.

I agree, I’ll just note that the fact that these features now become part of the mainstream means any language that doesn’t have them will feel severely limited. And it seems to me that it’s awfully hard to bring all of these features together in a way “normal” people can understand if you throw in a real type system.