I think it's a general consensus that Erlang does not handle dealing with strings very nicely. If Reia can abstract those problems away then it will probably gain a lot of traction. Probably much more than Lisp <del>For</del> Flavoured Erlang, unfortunately.
At least that was stated in their goals somewhere, and admittedly my Erlang-fu is fairly weak, so I could be missing something awesome in that area.