For me to leave the impression that its just a more elegant version of C++ is certainly selling it short. It does a lot differently than C++, different concepts and models for things, and a few tricks of its own. For example, one rather neat thing about it is that a defined subset of the language can execute on bare metal with no runtime support and you can compile against this subset, so its suitable for embedded systems but also higher-level than C -- I intend to do some bare-metal programming in Rust next year, either on the Raspberry Pi, Nintendo DS, or GBA, just for kicks. Anyway, when I said it was an safer and less cumbersome alternative to C++, I meant that its focussed on safety and is a more-coherent language than C++ is, but it serves mainly the same domain and you're programming at roughly the same level of abstraction with a procedural language -- but it is a very different language than C++, not a direct derivitive; its much further removed from C++ than, say, D, C#, or Java.
Anyways, I'll stop derailing the thread now If anyone wants to continue this thread of discussion, PM me, or start a new thread and PM me the link.
It's an interesting enough topic and something we havent discussed much recently, so I figure it deserves it's own thread. That said, I don't have a ton of recent experience with Rust so I will mostly be an observer in that discussion.