The boilerplate getters and setters in java do get old very quickly, and C#'s properties handle this nicely. On the surface, it seems like something minor and superficial, but when you are seeing the unnecessary verbosity of getters and setters day in and day out, it becomes frustrating not to have something like C#'s properties.
I definitely would like to see a similar feature in java. In the meantime, I am pleased with the features in java 8 after being underwhelmed by java 7's new features.
Me too. However, I don't think Java needs much to become an appealing language (for language-geeks).
It's already going to get lambdas. Add some shortcuts for getters and setters (Lombok-style, maybe) and collections literals, then you get surprisingly close to Groovy (and JPA @Entity classes will become 1/6 of their sizes). And just like Strings have special + and +=, Bignums could have some compiler help (as they already do in JSP EL).
It will still be behind C#, but not by much. At that point I could agree that Java and C# have different philosophies and Java will never get true operator overloading, but it doesn't matter much if the most important use cases are covered.
I definitely would like to see a similar feature in java. In the meantime, I am pleased with the features in java 8 after being underwhelmed by java 7's new features.