I used to be a member of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP), and Delphi was popular among small shops making Windows desktop applications. I never was a Delphi programmer, but it's adherents loved that it produced fast code with a small footprint. It combined a RAD environment let developers easily do low level coding when needed. When VB6 was canned by Microsoft, I think Delphi had an opening that they could have taken advantage of, but the various owners (Borland, Embarcadero) have always seemed to mis-manage the product. The latest Delphi has multi-platform support, but the pricing is still too high to get wide spread traction in my opinion.
I was always impressed by the Delphi Components ecosystem. There seemed to be a lot of useful code available at good prices - something I miss working as a web developer now.
Completely agree witht he product being mis-managed; it's still viable if they'd only make it competitive...
Compared to Cobol and Fortran, Pascal always was a blip on the radar. Some success as a teaching tool (UCSD etc.), then DOS (Turbo) and Windows (Delphi) programming. Small niches, not that much of legacy code (especially if you can keep the database and just e.g. exchange the Delphi frontend with an ASP.NET one).