I don't know Java or Swing, but I'm quite familiar with Scala, and I have no problems using it for my purposes. But when I try to implement a GUI, I get a lot of problems/bugs that documentation can't easily solve. I guess scala.swing examples could help a lot!
Are there any small but not trivial and well written applications using scala.swing that I could learn from?
There are many good examples in sources. I recommend checking it out.
Also, Ingo posted a nice intro to the scala.swing design.
I found that reading the sources wasn't so hard and helped a lot.