F# rocks. Pattern matching, like the example shown, can collapse huge logic structures into much smaller ones.
Add to that all the stuff you can do/get with all the .NET libraries, and it's possible to accomplish a lot of stuff with just a few lines of code.
Finally, when combined with brokering/message-passing libraries like MPI and immutable data structures, you're writing high-performance code with not that much overhead.
I imagine it's going to be a few more years until F# really takes off. I think the kicker is that it's going to out-of-the-box naturally scale better than it's peer CLR languages. (And yes, I'm aware that you can't do anything with F# you couldn't do in other CLR languages, but F# seems to promote writing parallelizing code whereas object-heavy languages like C# do not)