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From what I've seen, ROS has been popular among academics and startup robotic companies for a number of reasons:

• The Willow Garage internship program and PR2 program trained a lot of interns on how to use ROS, and when they went back to their universities, they brought ROS with them and trained the other students in their lab about how to use it.
• Willow Garage put a lot of effort into the documentation and documentation structure for ROS. This makes it easier to get started than competing frameworks. (This is the primary reason why I started using ROS)
• By it's structure, ROS is a federated framework, which makes it easier for developers to use other packages, and easier for developers to release their own work.
• OSRF (and Willow Garage before it) provide pre-compiled binaries to run ROS on Ubuntu. This helps make it easier to install and run ROS.
• There is a large demand for books about ROS, and therefore a reasonable number of books about ROS.
• ROS is (mostly) released under a BSD license that makes it easy for companies to use without worrying about copyright.
• There are a number of other companies building and supporting relatively capable ROS-based robots that are targeted at beginners, including the Turtlebot project and most of the robots that have been released by Clearpath Robotics.

The primary measures for the success of ROS are the number of papers that cite the original workshop about ROS at ICRA 2009, and the number of downloads of the ROS binary packages. I believe OSRF publishes both of these metrics.