I didn't think the elvis operator (?:) made it into java 7?

It didn't. Several people point this out in the comments.

I posted here before those comments were made. Perhaps should have posted there instead.

I don't fully get it. Is that blog post basically a "Scala is so much cooler then Java" post?

I must agree that the "We want our language to do everything, and with everything we mean more SymtaX!" approach Java is driving at the moment is not very cool, though. They should continue to optimize for enterprise software and enterprise dimensions as this is what Java is quite good at.