You're actually not too far off on your assessment of Delphi. Compared with all the .NET languages that sprang up to replace it, it's painfully verbose, inexpressive, and starved for community support.
On the other hand, what it still does well, decade after decade, is pump a 30MB native standalone executable from millions of SLOC in minutes, one that will run on any Windows box without installing any libraries or runtimes. That is, in its own way, impressive. Many businesses still depend on it and instead of an OSS community you wind up licensing libraries from the few remaining dev shops.
I don't know what the state of Delphi is now, but I remember there was a good community around it 6-7 years ago, plenty of Open Source components that filled the gaps in the VCL.
And back in the day, when .net was awkward to use and Java was too slow, Delphi was the king of RAD. Unfortunately they didn't even try to keep up with .net/Java, for example, proper Unicode support wasn't added until Delphi 2009.
The current state of Delphi is very good. I picked it up about 6 years ago, and it's a wonderful language to use for native Windows development. They just released cross-platform compilation for native OS X GUI and console applications, have 64-bit and 32-bit support.
In fact, the same person that invented C# first created Delphi (Anders Hejlsberg), and you can see how C# has borrowed much from Delphi.
Delphi, in the past 3 releases, has added native generics, anonymous methods, Unicode throughout the language by default, compiling native OS X applications, compiling iOS applications, and writing native 32-bit or 64-bit applications.
In addition, Pascal (and Delphi) does not have many of the serious security issues C/C++ developers have experienced, by design; e.g., format string bugs are non-existent because Delphi allocates strings on the heap.
Also, the Delphi community is alive and well over at StackOverflow. Unfortunately, many new developers in the US aren't familiar with Delphi...but it's extremely popular in European countries. It really is worth considering if you are writing native Windows applications that require complex GUI's done easily.
On the other hand, what it still does well, decade after decade, is pump a 30MB native standalone executable from millions of SLOC in minutes, one that will run on any Windows box without installing any libraries or runtimes. That is, in its own way, impressive. Many businesses still depend on it and instead of an OSS community you wind up licensing libraries from the few remaining dev shops.