Firstly it is functional. This is interesting in itself because generally most people have little to no experience with functional languages (such as LISP, Prolog, Erlang etc...). Functional programming is interesting and fun. The moment you discover that what took you 5 lines in a procedural language can be done in one elegant line in functional you feel enlightened.

It represents a new shift in programming. Rather then OO you do everything with message passing. While interesting in itself (you need to rethink how to do things) it also makes it scale to use as many cores/cpus as you can throw at it. Its not too difficult to write a multi core program in Java/Python/C++ but it is VERY hard to write one that scales to thousands of cores, which in theory erlang can. You get this for free without having to rely on locks which is not a scalable solution.

Its getting hype. Erlang the language may not be the future of programming, but the methods it uses and the way it forces you to write programs arguably is the future. If that dosnt make it interesting to anyone I dont know what will.

First of all let me say i am not an expert of erlang, i only had a peek into it out of personal curiosity, so take my opinion as not from using it but just from what the documentation says it does.

Erlang is a general purpose language orientated to concurrent programming, it runs interpreting byte code (like java) but can also be compiled into native code.
In my opinion it has three very interesting features:

1. It supports code hot swapping, this means that you can replace a module or load a new version of it which will cohesist with the previous one, without stopping a system
2. Spawning and managing processes is extremely easy with Erlang, opposite to most other languages were threads are complicated to handle.
3. processes created with erlang communicate using message passing! You don't need to share variables thus no need for locks!