Don't look to me for an unbiased opinion ... Tapestry has been my life for several years now, and I continue to love it.
That being said, the learning curve is getting less steep, the documentation is improving rapidly, and Igor's book is just around the corner.
Some of the things that confuse people are simply lack of documentation; for example, the naming conventions are optional, there's always more explicit configuration (in the form of method annotations) that some people are more comfortable with.
To address a couple of Henning points:
Tapestry component templates are, by design, static (and this is very important to Tapestry's scalability and clusterablity story). However, an add-on that's part of my TapX library supports dynamic external templates that fill the gap.
Also, if you want to keep your templates maximally spare, you can do that too, such as:
<form t:id="myForm">
... in the template, with the remainder in the Java class:
@Component(parameters={"zone=target", "clientValidation=blur",
"context=client", "secure=true")
private Form myForm;
.... in other words, all the Tapestry specific content out of the template and into the code. Not ideal for trivial components (more switching back and forth between template and Java source) but great for keeping the worlds nice and separate.