Edinburgh is a wonderful old city, which does have bagpipers on the streets and lots of tartan shops. But that is not all, Edinburgh is also a thriving, modern cultural city.
There is the annual international festival and the other, related, festivals every summer, and the world class hogmanay celebrations at new year. Combined with some top quality permanent attractions, this makes the city a great place to visit.
Due to the restricted space for building on, Edinburgh is a very compact city with every thing within a 30 minute walk. And the buses are quite good as well, there are 3 main companies all competing for business and so the fares are quite competitive.
Having everthing close together is a real bonus when combined with one of the advantages Scotland has from having a seperate legal system from the rest of the UK - better licencing hours. And not only are the pubs and clubs open much latter, there are also loads of them. Having 3 Universities and loads of visitors seems to allows Edinburgh to have a disproportionatly high number of pub/clus/restaurants.
Definately somewhere to visit at least once.