Angular 2 addresses a lot of the serious shortcomings in Angular 1.x. The Angular 2 approach to components and encapsulation feels cleaner and less complicated than the previous mess of services, factories, and directives.
Though initially skeptical of Typescript, I've found that Angular 2 really benefits from the advantages of having a coherent object model and optional type safety. Typescript never gets in the way, you can selectively use type declarations only where you want to use them. It's often helpful to leave them out while prototyping and then add them later when you want more robustness and easier debugging while you are working on writing the glue code and application logic that connects your various components.
As other posters have noted, you're still saddled with a lot of the artificial complexity and odd terminology that is pervasive in Angular 1.x. There are also bits and pieces of the library ecosystem, particularly the routing engine, that are over-engineered and painful to work with in practice. But, in general, I find version 2 much more intuitive and easier to reason about than version 1.x. Key features like data binding are much saner and behave more predictably.
I've never particularly liked Angular or React (my personal preference right now is for Vue or Polymer), but I think Angular 2 is a solid improvement over its predecessor. More significantly, I think the improvement is substantial enough to justify the team's decision to do a clean break.