I poked fun at Ant before. I applaud the devs for trying to develop a better development tool. I also see the usefulness of a less Unix-centric build tool when writing in Java (WORA, right?). The problem, as I see it, is that their cure is ultimately worse than the disease.
It is annoying to have to deal with hard tabs in Makefiles, but can anyone really claim that handwriting XML is more pleasant? I certainly cannot. A couple of commands in vim and the Makefiles are easy enough to work with. Nothing can take the pain of XML away--not even the hierarchical editors that are becoming common.
Another virtue of the Makefile is its beautiful simplicity. We have dependencies and then we have commands that can be used to update those dependencies that are automatically generated. An Ant build file, on the other hand, requires that all of its tasks be Java classes.
This makes Ant much less useful in the generic case. I have been playing with some literate programming lately and have to tangle the source out of the original Noweb file. In a Makefile, this is easy enough. In an Ant file, I have two choices: break out the Java compiler and write an Ant task to handle Noweb files cleanly. Or I can use the exec command (at least, I think that is what it is called--it is what NAnt calls it). If I do the former, I get a lot of overhead to do something simple. If I do the latter, I have an ugly XMLified Makefile.
In the final analysis, I think Ant would have been a lot more useful if it had kept the Makefile's cardinal simplicity and removed the ugly parts (hard tabs). To make it truly platform independent, common shell commands (copy, delete, etc.) may have needed some massaging by the Make system.