Just to adjust expectations: waiting an extra month or six would not have made Julia polished in the sense Matlab/R/Stata/… is. The package ecosystem will probably take years to develop mature libraries. In a lot of ways, 1.0 is the beginning of the journey, not the end; having a stable release should facilitate focusing on packages.
Many are already using Julia productively, and have been doing that for years. There is a price to pay in terms of convenience, but there are also great benefits. Those who expected a plug-in replacement for, say, Matlab, have somewhat unreasonable expectations about open source projects.