Alright, the question is how long until this thread gets locked down.
OT:It's animation is great, its characters are fleshed out and realized without being stereotypes, the voice acting is phenomenal, the songs are good, the subject matter is excellent, they don't treat the audience like idiots, and the Creator Lauren Faust made it with the intent that adults will be watching it with their daughters, thus she didn't dumb it down.
Lauren Faust was also able to make this happen by telling Hasbro that she wasn't just going to make a twenty minute commercial for the toy-line and actually make people care about what they are buying. Plus, she was very involved in the making of Powerpuff Girls, Codename Kids Next Door, and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, all of which are quite good.
And beyond that, it wasn't supposed to be good. It was supposed to continue the trend MLP suffers from and go from acceptable, to not good, to poor, to OMG Y U SO BAD, and so on. To have it not only break the trend but to be good has juxtaposed it to a new level and the pure shock of it not being terrible was enough to garner itself an initial audience to get a foothold in the older fans.
Also, since you're fairly new I feel I should tell you that these sort of threads are not really something that gets smiled upon and that you should totally use the search function as I have been apart of no less than a dozen of these threads with the same exact question.
