The most important thing in my opinion is the mindset. It has all the cool features you would expect from a high end framework and it continues to add features all the time. Anyone can read about those in documentation, but features are present in many other strong frameworks, such as Zend or Symfony. Laravel makes it feel like is easy to grasp some of the concepts that in other frameworks bend your mind and add to cognitive load. You need a minimal amount of semantics to perform a task, and is clear that a lot of effort was invested into making the api that easy to work with. There are multiple ways of doing things, appropriate for the needs of small or big projects, and/or different skill levels. Also, the people behind the framework have a level of contagious enthusiasm that makes you fall in love with that community just by observing their passion.