I see two drawbacks with 'Free Pascal', first the name (naming your language 'Pascal' is a surefire way of getting lots of people to turn off on the spot, even if it had lots of merits), secondly there does not seem to be any lively community around the language (but that may be related to the first item).
Personally I think delphi will always be one of the most undervalued platforms of all time. Good IDE, lightning fast, lots of libraries. In many ways it was way ahead of its time.
It's also an excellent example of product quality not being the metric by which success will be determined.
