I used Eclipse and my memories are hours spent to install some plugin (sometimes as necessary as Maven or Subversion support), typing some repository address, etc. Running something with apache tomcat was a quest. Sometimes things broke and you had to clean/redeploy it again and again until it worked. When I installed Idea and everything just worked, it was a truly superior experience. Idea is one of very few software products that I bought and continue to buy. I just really respect Jetbrains developers.
That said, there were few things that I liked in Eclipse. Errors were easier to work with. Also I could run uncompileable Java code and I liked it (Eclipse skipped bad code and throwed exception there).
That said, there were few things that I liked in Eclipse. Errors were easier to work with. Also I could run uncompileable Java code and I liked it (Eclipse skipped bad code and throwed exception there).