It's really not. Scala is a very interesting language, and it incorporates many functional features, but it's not at all ML-like. In particular, type annotations are needed in many, many places where they would be superfluous in an ML-derived language.
As a recent migrant from Ocaml to Scala (due to stagnation of Ocaml), I have to say that you are quite right about type-annotations, but the style of programming that an Ocaml/F# person would be accustomed to is quite easily replicable using Scala.
yep..I change from f# to scala and actually know many developers doing the same change...scala in first instance looks more verbose but actually it's much more powerfull (higher kinded types, scalaz, macros,etc) actually after accustom the syntax you find a clear and concise language (with ugly type annotations)
What do you mean by "stagnation of OCaml"? There was a period some 4-5 years ago where it did seem like there was little development on the language, but things have changed quite a lot since then. Lots of developments in the core language (including first-class modules and GADTs!), and a blossoming of the ecosystem around it. To me, it seems OCaml has never been livelier than now...
Let me start by saying that I <3 Ocaml. I've used it intensively for over 10 years.
By stagnation I mostly meant the comparatively tiny ecosystem of libraries vis-a-vis, e.g. JVM-based languages. In particular, with Akka, Scala has much nicer support for concurrency. The ability to call, and be called by, Java code in the smoothes possible way is also beneficial for my use cases.
I'm surprised that GADTs were added, because a few years ago I visited the Gallium team at INRIA who develop Ocaml, and asked about GADTs. I was told by one of the senior Ocaml developers that there were no plans for the inclusion on this feature.
(It's essentially what it says in the tin...)