Wouldn't it be a direct competitor for F# then instead of "filling the gap"? Scala has some more features, but the idea of fast and expressive functional-oop language is basically the same for both of them.

Also, F# was there first, has very good support in IDEs, integration with core .NET, etc. I think Scala would have a rather hard time on CLR (I may be biased, I don't know Scala very much and I worked with OCaml long before F# happened).