In two decades as a professional programmer, I have only ever heard glowing remarks from Delphi developers about their environment. Certainly Eclipse and even Smalltalk can't match that.
Delphi 6 and 7 were the best IDE's of their time, way better than Visual Studio 6. The language was great for the time, there was a vibrant community around it, you could find a component for everything. Borland also shipped the sources for their main library, VCL, which helped a lot when debugging. It was the best way to do Rapid Application Development.
Unfortunately, the company lost it's focus, they've tried to move to .net and the next few versions of the IDE were really buggy. The language also lagged behind C#/Java, they didn't add full Unicode support until 2009, for example.
They're no longer lagging. The most recent version has a new ui framework that is hardware accelerated and cross-platform (a pretty unique combination). You can even make iOS apps with it.
