If anything it helps think differently when facing problems. It makes you think about reliability, fault tolerance and concurrency in a new way. It is just as much a language as it is a new paradigm.
There some languages and toolkits started to copy some features from Erlang (Rust, Go, Scala's Akka, ...) they are all still pretty far from it in terms of providing the whole ecosystem (the full package).
Also Erlang has a great VM behind it (BEAM). It has a completely concurrent garbage collector and other nice things. That's why I am also excited about Elixir (I think there was a post here about that as well).
