I think a lot of the Lisp hype stems from the development environment. I was too tired on a cross country flight last night to do customer work, but I did work on two of my own projects: one using Java, IntelliJ, and the excellent Play! framework (dynamically compiles code while editing - fairly agile environment) and later another project in Common Lisp. Using Emacs + Slime + Common Lisp, at least for what I was working on (NLP stuff), just felt great. Two nice environments, but the Lisp environment was just more comfortable.
